I still have some penguin videos from my trip to Antarctica. Here are two from one of my favorite species, the chinstrap penguin (Pygoscelis antarcticus). Both videos were made at Orne Harbor.
First, tobogganing (not the same as an earlier video):
And the noisy rookery in the same place (some day I have to learn how to move the camera). The males are calling to the females:
A gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua) having a nice scratch in the middle of its perambulation on Greenwich Island:
Also on Greenwich, a gentoo tobogganing and then standing up to walk. They travel in their bellies only when there is smooth snow to glide on. (In all these videos, the background howling is the wind.)
And gentoos, having exited the water after fishing, head for their communal rookery at Vernadsky Research Base in Antarctica, a Ukrainian station. Note the “caution: skuas” sign!
Nice!
Great! Do they ever actually slide under the influence of gravity alone?
Instead of the march of the penguins we could have the slide of the penguins. What is all that scratching about? Dry skin?
Irritation from ticks [inc feather ticks] & mites is my guess
Thanks. Thanks for being our Antarctic explorer and videographer!
They are cute on snow.
“some day I have to learn how to move the camera”
A big help is a travel tripod. They are relatively compact and light. A head with quick release is nice too. A fairly good alternative is a monopod.
https://tinyurl.com/vrh2z5z
👍
I never tire of penguins.
I’ve missed it – why a “Caution Skuas” sign? Surely the penguins can’t read. Can they?
There’s a old Far Side cartoon that shows some birds sitting on a wire watching pedestrians walking around with targets on the tops of their heads. The caption is; “How birds see us” (or something like that). Is that the reason for the sign?
Imagine a dozen, well educated & creative young Irishmen stuck on an island with a Poitín still & 18 hours of dark in June & 24-hrs daylight for a few weeks each side of xmas. What you have here at the station is the Ukrainian equivalent situation, right down to the humour & shenanigans.
You have the Faraday Bar & the southernmost souvenir shop on the globe. After you’ve tweaked the vodka still, played darts, pool & cards, chatted up the tourists [large collection of bras donated by women who have visited the station], taught them some Uke dances, downed some shots, sobered up, whittled some wine corks, built a model schooner, done some ozone hole spotting, shrimp sampling & rock bashing – what then?
You turn to making fun souvenir shop geegaws & colourful, fun signs reminding the penguin community about the local gang of skua thugs. Alcohol, long dark days/nights out of tourist hunting season what else is a young man to do**?
** OK, there’s a small gym [pin-ups adorned], but in a 90% to 100% male crew on a 12-month tour – there’s still a lot of energy that’s got to go somewhere.
Well yes, I assumed it was tongue in cheek, but I like the idea that they were warning folks of accurate avian bombardiers. It’s funnier. Thanks
Tastes differ a lot don’t they Edward!? 🙂 I find it funnier that the pictorial warning signs are for the benefit of the penguins [which is what the Ukrainians claim the signs are for].
As an irrelevant aside:- Korean researchers discovered that skuas will attack those researchers the birds have seen mess non-destructively with their nests in the past, while ignoring researchers with a clean record. I suppose skuas go by clothing differences.
They could write depressing novels of lost love. 😎
Slav’s to love?
The Ukrainians are Slavs to love.
The Irish are exCeltent at it. 😎
Since different species of penguin seem to inhabit the same spaces above water, do they forage at different depths or have different diets to set them apart?
When they overlap in resource territory it’s depths that set them apart. I’m not a penguinologist, but Mr. Google indicates the main penguin resources down in the west Antarctic are built on the spring phytoplankton bloom – that’s the clock that sets the lives of all the birds & mammals down there which are of course all predators or scavengers dependent on the phyto > krill chain.
As I understand it, when the resource competition is between range-overlapping penguin species they don’t waste very valuable energy fighting each other in the waters, instead they focus more tightly where their particular species is at a peak of efficiency – they exploit different depths for the same food.
Adélie & gentoo penguins reach an accommodation over food resources is an example I found for Palmer Station on the West Antarctic Peninsular [worth reading the whole thing in the link]:
I read somewhere else that some penguin species compete for common nest sites, but I don’t know if ‘accommodation’ happens in such cases.
I imagine they’d all be in competition with baleen whales who eat krill. The penguins eat fish that feed on the krill as well as the krill itself.
I think I said that in my reply to Hampenstein – when the whale hoovers [vacuum cleaners] arrive the penguins switch from easy krill catches to the harder fish catches?
Vacuum cleaners that in many cases are endangered. I think the cat and dog food industries have something to answer for. Speaking of which, I think the emperor penguin is declining rapidly and is expected to go extinct.
Thx, Michael!
Have you ever considered trying to grow and trim a beard into a “chinstrap”? Just for a joke, if nothing else.
For the penguins, or the humans?
A propos of nothing at all, I wonder what the German for “skua” is?
Oh, boring.
I was wondering if it had inspired the naming of the German WW2 dive bomber, the Stuka. But that’s got a different etymology, “(from Sturzkampfflugzeug, “dive bomber”)”.