March 2 Green hills and the Royals!

I could have spent the day just gazing at all this.

Way down below you can see some penguins totally dwarfed by the seals - the seals dwarfed the people too!

Pleurophylum hookeri These produce large purple petal-less disk florets. We walked on a narrow boardwalk all the way from the beach to a Royal penguin colony

Big South Polar Skuas. I saw an egg near them - theirs I figured rather than a stolen one.



I absolutely love this plant - Stilbocarpa polaris. A rhubarb-like herb which grows to 1m tall and 2m wide.

Just panning back so you can see in the distance a patch of spotty white - a penguin colony. There were quite a few such colonies on the slopes of these hills. Remember that these little guys have very short legs - what a feat.

It was a raucous crowd!

If you zoom in you will find a few birds that are obviously moulting. March to April the Royal penguins return from the sea to moult and spend up to a month on shore. During that time while they are moulting, they can't return to sea as their feathers are not waterproof (some of them in the process of waterproofing their new feathers; remember that oil gland under the tail). The upshot of that is that if they haven't eaten enough at sea before they start to moult, they die of starvation.

We climbed up the hill behind Sandy Beach to visit the Royal Penguin colony - and importantly for me to have a squizz at the plants! The Island it is definitely coming back into its own! Rabbits and rodents severely damaged the vegetation and hillsides causing landslides and the destruction of breeding sites for seals and birds alike. There has been a significant eradication program to restore the island and, to my untrained eye, it’s looking pretty good.
AND I got to see some of the beautiful mega herbs I was so so hoping to see - and there’s more to come as we push further north to the Auckland Islands and the Snares. In the meantime, enjoy a little of Macquarie Island through my eyes in this and the last couple of posts.

But just before I go ..... These islands, and indeed NZ mainland, remind me of Tasmania. Interesting as I look back over photos from our Tassie trip in 2017, I find weird plants like the Pandani in Tassie’s SW wilderness. The Subantarctic Islands have grass trees and flax, different of course to Tassie but Gondwana but connections perhaps!? The Pandani (Richea pandaniflora) I saw at Lake Oberon, Mt Field NP is certainly an ancient plant. The first European to describe it was botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker in his 1844 publication The botany of the Antarctic voyage of H.M. discovery ships Erebus and Terror. I. Flora Antarctica. That was Ross's voyage to Antarctica when he described the Ross Sea and Ice Shelf . Hooker's name appears linked to a number of flora and fauna of the region of the Subantarctic. I just love that connection!
That's the Pandani of Tassie just for interest.