Hi Everyone,
I hope you are all recovering from your Christmas exertions and are enjoying a relaxing holiday.
As promised, today I’ll give some detail of the wildlife we have been seeing. Over the past few days we have been seeing more and more seabirds with a good number of them following the ship over the course of multiple days. Arguably the most iconic are the albatrosses, we frequently have 2 or 3 wandering albatross around at any given time.
These birds are absolutely magnificent, with a multiple meter wingspan and on the afternoon of Christmas day they were flying incredibly close to the upper deck so that you could almost touch them. Wandering albatross can be distinguished by their large size, white on the top of the wing in the centre, and juveniles have a mottled body (many of the albatross we have observed have been juveniles). I personally think we saw a royal albatross as well, these are also very large but do not have the mottled shape and the white areas on the wing are concentrated towards the front of the wing. We also saw some sooty albatross which were a little smaller and entirely dark brown in colouration.
These birds are amazing to watch as they exert almost no effort soaring around in incredibly strong winds. In the days I have been watching them so far, I have only seen one flap once!
We have also seen a plethora of smaller birds which have been mostly petrels, which we have struggled somewhat to identify but have certainly included a good number of storm petrels and spectacled petrels.
Today was also a great day because I got to do some real oceanography. I spent around 4 hours in the afternoon working to learn how to use the salinometer. This is a very hi-tech piece of equipment used to determine the salinity of seawater to a very high degree of accuracy, able to detect the equivalent of a teaspoon of salt in 5 tonnes of water. Fortunately the procedure is relatively simple but each crate of samples takes about 2 hours to process so I think I will get very familiar with this machine before the end of the cruise!
Finally, we finished our Christmas celebrations with a Boxing Day BBQ and “Disco” on the rear deck of the Discovery. We were incredibly lucky with the weather, possibly our last day of good warm weather for a while as we cross some of the Antarctic fronts. We had a fantastic BBQ in the beautiful sunshine while albatross circled overhead and some great (and very nostalgic tunes blasted overhead). The music was a very eclectic mix, but definitely aimed at the 80s-90s eras, I think we terrified some of the non-UK nationals with the synchronised choreo to “Reach for the stars”. After the music died down we moved up to the monkey island to investigate some rumoured whale sightings. We were well rewarded! I am afraid I didn’t manage to get any good photos, but we saw many spouts in the distance, but also a fin whale within about 100m of the boat and a few humpback sightings a bit further away.
An absolutely fantastic end to the day!
26/12/22
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