Macquarie Island

Sunday, 15 February 2009

Macquarie Island lies about halfway between Australia and Antarctica and almost 1000km southwest from New Zealand. It has been part of the Australian state of Tasmania since 1900. In 1978 the island became a Tasmanian State Reserve and in 1997 it became a world heritage site. The island has narrow elongated shape (34 kilometres long and only 5 kilometres wide at its widest point), with higher parts in the north and south and an isthmus in between. An extensive research station lies in this lower part at the northern end of the island.



The research station, operated by Australia, houses over forty people in the summer and around twenty through the winter. The research subjects include biology, botany, auroral physics, meteorology and medical research. I don't know what auroral physics is all about, but it has something to do with measuring solar wind. This link takes you to an informative website about the Macquarie Research. The research staff gave us a tour of their side of the island and treated us to tea and scones afterwards.

However, we first landed in Sandy Bay to enjoy the wonderful wildlife of the island. We found ourselves among king and royal penguins. Of all the different penguin species we saw on this trip, the king penguins are definitely my favourites. They look a bit like emperor penguins, but are smaller. They reached just above my knee. They have really gorgeous colouring. The kings are very curious and if you sit or stand quietly, they come right up to you to have a look.



On one side of the beach was a large colony of king penguins, with big brown fluffy chicks. On the other side of the beach the royal penguins were coming ashore. They have large yellow crests (eyebrows) and are smaller than the kings. Their colony is on the other side of the island and contains hundreds of thousands of penguins.



Ironically, sited among them, now corroded by rust, were the vats used in the past to boil them up for their oil. By and large the penguins have managed to recover from the slaughter of the past. It is estimated that about two million penguins were killed between 1890 and 1919. The elephant seals, also boiled for their blubber, have also managed to regain their numbers. Only the fur seals, hunted for their pelts, had been hunted down to too small a number to recover to their original high numbers. This carnage on Macquarie Island was the bright idea of Joseph Hatch a New Zealand politician whose company J. Hatch & Co was based in Invercargill.



Elephant seals are in my opinion among the ugliest animals in the world. They are called elephant seal because the males develop a grotesque trunk-like nose and they grow to a colossal size of up to 5 meters long and they can weigh up to 6 ton (2,700 kg). The females are much smaller. The males are territorial, guard their harem of females ferociously and will fight to the death to defend their patch — which is why they need such a huge size. We saw a few bones and skulls of elephant seals scattered in the grass, as well as a corpse of one who had died a day or so earlier. Skuas were busy doing their clean-up work. Skua are offal eaters and known as the vultures of the seas.



We also saw a desiccated corpse of a seal that had died in a fight the year before. According to one of the biologists, who was working on the island, this one had more or less imploded after a fierce fight.



So, it was not all fluffy penguins and cuteness, but nature at work as per normal.

The giant blobs of elephant seals had gouged huge hollows in passages into the tussock of the island.

Every time I saw one of those giants I took a photo, only to see an even bigger one further on. And these were only the young bachelors, basking on the windy cold beach to moult. Although elephant seals are amazing in water and can dive to great depths (up to 1550 m beneath the ocean's surface), they looked ungainly on land. I took a movie of one that was blobbing his way into the water.



Apart from king and royal penguins, we saw gentoos, who are not crested and about the size of royals. Gentoos are also quite pretty, with a striking white stripe along their black wings, and a white stripe from their eye to the top of their head. Their black beak has a bright red stripe. The ones we saw did not look so very pretty though, because they too were moulting.



In the distance we could spot some little rockhopper penguins, We would have liked to get closer to the rockhoppers, but we received a message that we needed to hurry back to the boat in the zodiacs because the wind was picking up, which would make it much harder to get back on board and also the ship did not want to hover so close to the rocky shore. Boating away from Macquarie we passed the side of the large penguin colonies. It is estimated that there are about 200,000 to 300,000 king penguins in Lusitania Bay on the island now, and the colonies of royal penguins total about 7 to 800,000. This after Hatch had reduced the numbers to about 6000.

Auckland Islands part 2

Friday 13 February 2009, Carnley Harbour

Overnight we moved around Auckland Island and in the early morning we were greeted by a soft cloudy sunrise, although the waves were pretty high and crashed right up to the bridge windows at times. But once we entered Carnley Harbour the water was more peaceful. Although this is the harbour in which the Grafton was wrecked, we did not get to see the remains of the ship. For those interested, however, here is a brief summary of the exciting story of the shipwreck in 1864, how the men managed to survive and how they were finally saved. And if you have a broader interest in the shipwrecks of the Auckland Islands, here is another informative piece with a list of wrecks and provision depots.

Our reason for landing here was to look at the remains of the huts used by coast watchers during World War II. At the beginning of the war the New Zealand Government had been alarmed by the fact that a German merchant vessel, desperate to get home after the declaration of war, had landed on Auckland Island and cut down a large stand of rata to use as fuel. Below is a picture of a rata flower. The rata here are very stunted and bush rather than tree. The wood is very hard and difficult to chop. The New Zealand revenge?


The Government decided to establish coast-watching stations early in 1941 in the Auckland Islands and on Campbell Island. Robert Alexander Falla, an ornithologist and Director of the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch who served in a naval auxiliary patrol, was called in as an adviser. He was instrumental in having young scientists included in the personnel at each base, and set up a scientific programme; he himself also served in the field. The result was a long series of published works on the geology, zoology and botany of these islands. Below are pictures of the inside of the observation hut.



The names of participating scientists are found in landmarks on the islands: Falla is commemorated by Falla Peninsula; the palæontologist Charles Alexander Fleming is commemorated by Fleming Plateau and the ornithologist Evan Graham Turbott is remembered by Turbott Lake.

From Auckland Island it took us a day and a half to motor to Macquarie Island, which visit was among the many highlights of the trip because of the penguins and the elephant seals. More about this in the next post.

Auckland Islands

Thursday 12 February 2009
The rest of Wednesday was filled with reading, walking on deck (hazardous!), talking to people and lots of snoozing to overcome mild feelings of seasickness. The next morning we woke up strangely refreshed. The ship was lying blissfully still, anchored in a quiet harbour by Enderby Island, which is the smallest of the three islands comprising the Auckland Islands. Click here for a useful map, which also shows the sites of the many shipwrecks. The Invercauld, which I mentioned in my blog entry for 11 January 2009 was wrecked on the north-west corner of the main island. We landed at the site of a research station, where they study the Hooker sea lions and the penguins and other wildlife.

We crossed the island from our landing place. This part is covered by a boardwalk, which is pleasant, because it can get extremely muddy. At the top, once we came out of the shelter of the shrubs and trees, it blew a stiff wind. It wasn't easy to keep one's balance on the board walk, which was quite narrow. But it was ideal weather for albatrosses, who circled overhead.

In many ways the Auckland Islands resemble Stewart Island, which lies just off the south coast of the South Island of New Zealand, but because they are more southerly, the vegetation is different and more stunted and windswept. Stewart Island contains typical New Zealand bush vegetation, but the Auckland Islands are famous for their megaherbs.
The islands are also famous for the furious weather and winds, which blast against the rocky coast, hence the many shipwrecks. In Enderby there is a memorial to fifteen people who died when the ship the Derry Castle went down in March 1887. The regular occurrence of shipwrecks prompted the New Zealand government to build small provisioned huts as shelter. There was one still on the island. It's the size of a small tent.


During our brisk and exciting tramp around the perimeter of Enderby, which took a large part of the day, we saw lots of sea lions lying about — in fact we occasionally had to detour when a sea lion, hidden by the high tussock grass, suddenly popped up her head right in front of us. Yellow eyed penguins hopped out of the sea and scrambled over the rocks. And we saw a lot of shags, skua and a number of albatrosses. In many places it is difficult if not impossible to get across the islands, because the shrubs and stunted trees form such dense undergrowth.This is what makes the islands so appealing to me: the strange vegetation.



We also saw an endemic gentian in white, pink and purple. The soil is very peaty, spongy and bouncy. The grass and bush had lots of different colours, but the megaherbs had more or less finished blooming and were reduced to brown stalks and seed heads. The hardest part of this five hour walk was the high tussock. There’s no proper path and we had to find the best way through. The tussock grass occasionally snared the tip of my boots and once I fell flat on my face.

The tussock gave us good shelter for our lunch. That's my cabin mate Julia.

The trip back to the mothership was an adventure in itself. By then the wind had risen again and the sea was getting very choppy. The tide was also coming in, making big waves on the beach. Those sitting at the back of the boat got soaked several times by high waves, while the rest of us were trying to clamber into the Zodiac. The boatsman couldn’t get the Zodiac away from the beach. When he finally managed to push it out a bit and managed to struggle on board, the tide had thrown the Zodiac back on the beach. So we all had to get out again, jump into the surf, so that the Zodiac could be moved further along the beach to a calmer spot. This time we were successful and all got on board safely. But the trip back was no picnic either. The waves were high and this time those in front got splashed. Lucky me sat in the middle and missed most of the soakings. Trying to jump out of the Zodiac onto the gangplank stairs, with the waves constantly either lifting the Zodiac above the platform or pushing it underneath was also a bit of an effort and not for the fainthearted. At the end of the day my tramping boots were totally soaked from submersions and my clothes and pack were very wet, but — thank goodness — waterproof (I have a good lining bag for my backpack) and my camera was safe and dry. Some warm clothes quickly warmed us up, helped by a cup of soup in the lounge/bar. After a wonderful exciting although strenuous day the evening meal tasted grand.