Now I understood why
Pieter had wanted to spend these days on Sea Lion Island: this Sunday was to be
a very special birthday! We decided to spend the morning sampling a couple of
sites, and the afternoon visiting 2 bird colonies. For me, this was also the
occasion to try out my new dry suit. Given the wind direction, we opted to go
to the “Orca Pool” – a site where Pieter had eyewitnessed a pack of 5 orcas
killing an elephant seal in November 2011. The orcas were gone now and the
swell was not too bad, so we deemed the site safe for snorkelling. The new dry
suit passed the test, I managed to collect a number of seaweeds growing
underneath the Durvillaea canopy and
in the battered swell zone – habitats otherwise inaccessible by waders or scuba
diving, snorkelling and creeping on the rocks really is the only option to
access them -, and I had great fun swimming and snorkelling with penguins,
flightless steamer ducks and cormorants. In the meantime, Pieter and Alexandra
sampled a number of higher plants and small freshwater habitats for oomycete
isolation work: his two previous visit to Sea Lion Island had resulted in the
discovery of 3 new species of oomycetes. After a nice lunch at the Sea Lion
Lodge, we headed to the colonies of Imperial Cormorants and Rockhopper Penguins
in the SW of the island. A strong stench of ammonia hung over the cormorants’
colony (“βρομάει απαίσια” was part of Alexandra’s daily Greek lesson for me). Both colonies
were under constant watch by a number of skuas and caracaras (the latter are
one of the rarest, if not the rarest species of bird of prey in the World – but
they are actually quite abundant in parts of the Falklands). One of the
caracaras was most intrigued by my backpack which I had left on a rock above
the penguin colony. The Rockhopper
colony is also the site of the HMS Sheffield memorial, which was lost to an
Argentine Exocet missile 40 nautical miles SE off Sea Lion Island on May 4,
1982 – this was the closest bit of land to the site of the sinking. The
Falklands are a paradise-like place now, but the memory of the 1982 war remains
almost omnipresent.
