Antarctic Journal

I spent the day in a Haaglund--a larger version of the small tracked vehicle called a Spryte--going out to Cape Royds. Cape Royds is the site of an Adelie penguin rookery and also the site of Ernest Shackleton's 1908 hut. He lived there with his fellow adventurers when he went to the South Pole. He got to within about 90 miles of the pole then.

On the way out to the Cape we saw Emperor penguins. They had walked over to a flag stuck in the snow. They'd walked all the way from the ice edge. About a three or four mile walk. They do that, I hear. They are very curious beasts and will walk long distances just to see what is up. So, there were three of them and we got out of the vehicle and walked toward them and they walked toward us. I sat down and turned so that Buck, the sea ice expert fellow who was taking us out to Royds, could take a picture, and as we sat with our backs to the penguinos they walked even closer. Very cool. They do this amazing throaty trumpeting sound.

When we got to the rookery, we had to park the Haaglund and walk over a hill. As soon as we got over the hill I could see this mass of penguins, over 4,000 of them, spread out over these little rocky hills and dales, making a chirping, quacking racket. Adelies are the little black and white ones. It was an awesome sight, and beyond the cape there was open water. We stood up on top of one of the bluffs for a while and looked out over the ice and the water. We could see seals that had come up from the open sea and Emerpeors who were waddling along the ice edge. An amazing sight. No end to the adventures.

I saw my first SKUA when we were on our way to Cape Royds. We had gone to Buck's secret below sea level lake, called "GoDownSlo Lake." That is his name for it anyway. As we were standing there admiring the little lake a skua flew over.

To Skua, by the way, is a very fine word down here. The Skua is an infamous Antarctic bird. It is big like a gull, in fact I think it is a type of gull. It is well known for its tenacity. Not unlike the raven. It eats anything. It has been known to dive into dumpsters, into flaming dump piles (back in the days when they set the dump on fire here), and even to sit on the edges of a red hot barbeque, all to get food. It is aggressive too, in that it will dive bomb humans. So, there is a tradition here called skuaing. There are skua piles in all the dorms and a big main skua central. It is funny that as soon as something gets put into the skua pile, it disappears. I put a pair of boots in the skua pile at the end of my hall and they disappeared the next time I went out to look. I also put a bottle of bubbles and two bottles of sunscreen. Poof! gone. Skuaed. I ask my friend Charlotte where she got a thing and she says she "skuaed" it.

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