A penguin lover’s paradise! As soon as you step off the zodiac, they're all around you. Well, not so much that you felt like a scene from Hitchcock’s
The Birds, but they were going about their business at the water’s edge, up a hill at their nests, dipping in and out of the waters and casually walking along their “penguin highways” (rusty-colored, well-worn ruts in the snow).
Yankee Harbor is a small place (about 1.4 miles long) within a cove surrounded by Glacier Bluff and Spit Point. It resides on Greenwich Island in the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica.
With your 100-150mm telephoto lens you’re right there in the thick of families and their chicks. Since their only predators are leopard seals and orcas, we can sit or kneel on the snow as they pass and photograph them to our heart's content ... respecting that this is
their home.
Penguins closer to the Antarctic Circle still had eggs or newborn chicks when we were there in very early January. By contrast, these Yankee Harbor Gentoo chicks were already half the size of their parents … hungry, loud and so very cute!
