Lions and Whales and Penguins, Oh My

 

Like last week, the title of this week’s post is a little misleading. The lions were sea lions, and the whales were merely skeletons. There were apparently live whales where we cruised, but we never saw any. We did see three species of penguins, however.

The sea lion colony was part of an excursion from Puerto Madryn, Argentina. It was mating season and we couldn’t get very close, but they were still interesting. In my letter home I called them “cute,” but they are actually quite ugly. The next two photos show the colony and as much of a close-up as I could get of the baby sea lions with my zoom lens.

There were partial whale skeletons near the sea lion viewing area, but the most complete one we saw was outside an ecocenter where the excursion took us next. That’s the skeleton in the next photo.

The whale skeleton was the only worthwhile part of the visit to the ecocenter. The main “attraction” of that part of the excursion was a very confusing lecture about the evolution of the penguin. The woman’s theses was that penguins had lost their ability to fly when adapting to environmental conditions that put them in the oceans where they had to fish for a living. She claimed the adaptation was necessary because it is anatomically impossible for any animal to both fly and hunt underwater. Of course there are birds that dive underwater to catch fish, but she said that wasn’t the same since they locate their prey from the sky or the surface and dive only long enough to pluck them out of the water, while penguins hunt underwater and stay submerged much longer than other birds. The lecturer was also adamant that in the 60 million years (I think she said) that penguins have existed on the earth, they were never able to fly. So I had trouble following her reasoning.

Although the lecture on penguins was boring, the penguins themselves were very interesting when we saw live ones in the Falkland Islands. They are very social birds that they live with their families in larger groups, although we were told that they don’t usually mingle with other types of penguins. That’s why we were lucky to see three species, including two King penguins among a group of Gentoo penguins. Here is a brief primer.

King penguins are the largest ones seen outside of Antarctica where the Emperor penguins live. King penguins have orange behind the head and yellow breasts, which is how you can pick them out of the following photo—one standing and one lying down.

Most of the penguins we saw were Gentoo penguins, which are the next largest and have orange bills and feet. Those are Gentoo penguins in the photo at the top of this post.

The other species we saw was the Magellanic penguins. I think of them as black and white, although apparently they have a small amount of pink around the eyes. Here are two photos of Magellanic penguins. The first shows the conditions we watched the various penguin species in during our morning excursion, with a cold wind and snow. The other was taken on our afternoon excursion. He looks like a loner, but that’s only when he’s out getting food for his family.

It was cold, windy, and snowing in the Falkland Islands even though it’s summer there, but it was my favorite day because I loved watching the penguins.

I enjoyed all of the wildlife we saw on our cruise, but next week I’ll tell you about some of the gorgeous landscapes.