An Incredible Place

Photos © 2006 Seth White

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OK, I finally made it to Cape Royds. For three years I had been wanting to see this place more than anywhere else on the ice...and last week a group doing research there asked me to help with a survey one of their visits. Naturally, I kept expecting a storm to blow in and cancel the trip, but it never did and so the next day we were on our way. This is the site of an Adelie penguin colony, which was a first for me. But the place also has major historical significance as it is the site on which Ernest Shackleton built his hut for the 1907 Nimrod expedition. And so, here's the building.
The best thing about this trip was the fact that the project's PI, Yu-Ping Chin, came along. As it turns out, he's an Antarctic history buff like me... and he had undergone the training to be an official tour guide of the hut (something I haven't done yet). So he brought the key and gave everyone a tour. This was fantastic, I tell you, and I wish I'd have had an entire day to just photograph the place and soak it all up. But it was still amazing to just set foot inside for an hour. Here's another pic from outside.
I am guessing this is a spare wheel from a motor sledge Shackleton brought on his trip. Turns out it didn't work worth a damn, but this expedition did mark the first use of motorized transport in Antarctica. The sledge is in the Canterbury museum in Christchurch, along with the first surface vehicle to reach the South Pole (a Ferguson tractor). Another first on this expedition was an ascent of Mt. Erebus. Like seemingly all of the early sledging trips, the men had some serious hardships along the way. But they made it to the top and peered down into the crater for the first time. Must have been incredible. They also discovered the unique and beautiful Erebus crystals.
When you step into this hut, it is somewhat of a cheerful feeling, unlike the two huts built by Scott at Cape Evans (Terra Nova expedition, 1911) and Hut Point (Discovery expedition, 1901). In 2002-03 I made a webpage for both of these huts, here and here. The Discovery hut can be summed up best by the word "melancholy". The Terra Nova hut to me is "solemn". For the Nimrod hut, I'd say "peaceful" suits it best. There are ghosts in each place, make no mistake. But this one is just more comfortable and inviting. Perhaps my mindset was a little different on the day I visited Cape Royds versus the other places, but nonetheless it is much different. Here are some shelves on a wall, populated with various jars of various things.
The centerpiece of the whole place is this stove. The two hooks in view hanging from the ceiling were used to raise and lower the dinner table. There were 15 men, I believe, cramped into this tiny hut, and so space was at an absolute premium. For these pictures I brought along a solid tripod my brother gave me, and was happy I could capture some good detail.
The stove.
Another shelf, with some tins of appetizing Moir's Lunch Tongue! Mmmmm. Some members of the Antarctic Heritage Trust were here earlier in the season doing some major restoration on this hut, and I believe they are due back any time. They actually dug around the exterior of the hut and found some crates of food had rotted out, and the tins had spilled their guts. The rotting food had actually started to rot the sides of the building, so they took the tins away to empty them out. But they are going to restore them, tag them, and replace them in the same positions as found. Cool work...I'd love to get involved in this, but I'm afraid I don't know jack schitt about restoration and preservation of such things. Maybe I can convince them they NEED to have super-accurate GPS positions of every artifact?
I really like the labels on crates you find at these huts. I like this picture too.
Another wall of the hut, near the door. Here, Mr. Joyce is advertising for his free skinning academy. Ernest Joyce was one of the more capable Antarctic hands, and came to the Ross Sea area on the Discovery, Nimrod, and Endurance (Ross Sea Party) expeditions.
A biscuit tin, with biscuits inside.
The first thing I asked when I walked inside was "where is Shackleton's signature?". I knew that he had signed his name on a wall somewhere. Dr. Chin pointed it out and I took a photo. It's behind a bed, on what looks like a crate board. And it's upside down. So here you go.
Outside, a Heroic Trash Heap. Yes, their garbage dump is a legit historic site.
This is the Adelie penguin colony. The colony and nearby Pony Lake comprise a Antarctic Specially Managed Area (ASMA), where a permit is required to enter. Five or six small signs mark the boundary, so some of us milled around at the boundary edge watching the penguins. This is looking more or less southward, toward McMurdo, from a hill above the colony.
A penguin sitting on an egg on a nest of rocks. The Adelies are famous for their rock gathering during nesting season. It is often a contentious exercise, where fights will break out over the "best" pebbles, which will in turn attract the "best" mates to nest there. Dena is a high school teacher from San Diego, down here with a group studying Pony Lake as part of a teachers' program. She has also been to the North Pole...only the second person I've met who's been there. Me, jealous? You bet! She has a good running blog this season, which can be found as a link from this page. She had ringside seats this day for a "knock-down, drag-out brawl" that flared up between two male penguins. They will slap each other with their wings, peck, and cause all sorts of mayhem. Evidently, some of them get pretty bloody after fights. So it goes. Not that much different than humans. Researcher David Ainley was also on site, camped out studying the birds. A raucous, smelly place, the penguin rookery. No surprise that his tent is pitched a good distance away from the rookery itself.
As I was standing on the rocks overlooking the rookery, something moved a few yards below my feet...this penguin was nesting there and I didn't see it until it poked its head up over the rock.
Sadly, this penguin colony is in bad shape. The persistent sea ice cover the past few years has made it very difficult for these birds to feed their young. The sea ice edge is dozens of kilometers from Cape Royds, so they have to walk all the way out there, swim around to catch food, then walk back to feed the ever-hungry chicks. Here's a look at some of the determined penguins heading north towards water. There are cracks in the sea ice near the land where they could dive for food, but the krill evidently are not swimming under the sea ice this far from the ice edge. So it's a long march for these guys... and there is no guarantee that their chicks will be alive when they get back. The chick could have starved, or been snatched by a skua when the other parent was not paying complete attention. I overheard a conversation between a few others at Cape Royds where somebody said there were only about half as many penguins here this year as last...and last year wasn't a good year. If this ice would flow out to sea, I'm sure it would help the birds quite a bit. But a substantial storm would be needed for that...who knows if that'll happen anytime this summer. There will most likely be a good storm later in the austral fall that will send some of the ice out, especially since the entrance to McMurdo Sound is not completely choked off by icebergs anymore. But by that time it'll be too late for many of the chicks.
The fenced-off area on the left here is a miniature Penguin Ranch. The research group put a fence up around a group of nests, and the birds are automatically weighed and scanned as the enter or exit the area.
A seal carcass. With all the skuas around you can be sure there is NOTHING of nutritional value left anywhere within.
A old-fashined Mexican Standoff. In case you wanted to know, this is what a pissed off penguin looks like. The skuas are relentless, and will grab any chick that wanders away from its parent at all.
Cape Royds is some neat terrain. There are these nicely formed lava brick walls with little "paths" running along inside, like an Irish countryside scene in black. We had an extra hour as the helicopter was late arriving, so a few of us took a walk around the area. It's a real moonscape, but here and there are smooth, brightly colored rocks that don't fit in at all with harsh black rock. And rocks eroded into beautiful shapes are scattered around as well.
While writing this page, this thought occurred to me: so far, between zoos, New Zealand, and the ice, I've seen 6 species of penguins. Two of these were on my way down to the ice this year when I went to see the Yellow-Eyed and Blue penguins in Oamaru, New Zealand. The Blue penguins only come to land during the night, and are very sensitive to camera flash. So no photos here. But I did get a photo of the rare Yellow-Eyed penguin on a tour of their nesting area given by one of the lead conservationists. So here is what one such penguin looks like. Some strange sickness had really hurt their population numbers last season, but there's hope that they are on the rebound. The Kiwis have had a lot of success in protecting the Blue penguins, and they are now relatively plentiful compared to their numbers in years past. But the Yellow-Eyed are still comparatively rare. There's a hillside near Oamaru where a few of them nest...it's off limits, but if you schedule a tour in advance you can get right up to them. Their nests are so well hidden that you can walk right by and not see them.
The Blue penguins also have a rookery in the town of Oamaru, right near some docks. The conservationists reclaimed part of this area and have built a protected spot for them, complete with little burrows in a fenced-off zone. They also built grandstands for tourists to watch the nightly return of these guys from their day foraging at sea. It's quite a spectacle. They all bunch up in a pack just offshore, ride the waves, and then surf in in a giant mass of silver and blue. They pop up on land, most of them gracefully, and then waddle to their burrows. They are among the smallest of the penguin species. You are also cautioned not to run any of them over as you drive out, since they are creatures of habit and some of them choose to enter their rookery by crossing the road. So here is a sign you don't see very often...
The sun started to come out toward the end of our time at Cape Royds, and peeked through the clouds long enough to light up the Barne Glacier to the south. So here is a photo of that scene. Today's random excellent thing about McMurdo: the pirate radio station, 88.7 FM, complete with sarcastic promos. Actually, this qualifies as this week's "outstanding" or even "superior" thing about McMurdo. It's only a few hundred milliwats, but can be heard clearly around town. We get the AFN (or AFRTS, aka "A-farts") radio broadcast, but it is awful. Now and then people will use the radio booth in building 155 and do radio shows. Very cool, but also hit or miss. Scott Base radio comes in if you're out of the "shadow" of Ob Hill, but that is REALLY hit-or-miss. The pirate station really is the best alternative. Today's not-so-random, not-so-excellent thing about McMurdo: morale. Not good, my friends. My only other full season at McMurdo was summer 02-03, but I can tell you this: from my perspective, the overall attitude is noticeably down since then. The population numbers this year among on-ice RPSC employees: approximately 60% new, 40% returning. In other years, these numbers are generally reversed. Of course the rumor mill at McMurdo is an astonishing thing, and unless one has solid proof of a statement, one should be skeptical of its validity. However, hearing the same thing from multiple "independent" sources tends to solidify statements. And I've heard these numbers quoted a lot this year.