Hanging out with feathered royalty

1-11-12

I was airfield taxi tonight and Birty (Mel's new nickmakes synonomous with Ted and Special Ted: Hurricane Berta and Dirty Birty) was waiting for her departure time for the airfield shuttle so she was hanging out in my van when we heard over the radio a call from fleet ops talking about "2 visitors" We thought it sounded suspicious and figured it was penguins. I got out my binoculars and could see a couple of fleet ops vehicles just a few miles away. So I told Mel to hold on and we sped off to try and get there before she had to be back. To our joy, it was indeed two Emperors. We got out of the van and watched them do their land swimming. But then they stood up and walked right up to us. They are quite curious birds and we got within a couple feet of these gorgeous and regal birds. They're seriously stunning animals.

After work, Mel and I took a walk out to hut point to see if we could see some more penguins as we just had a feeling. We got lucky and saw an Adelie penguin down by the big ice crack. It was awesome b/c we got to see him jump in and out of the water a couple of times which was quite hilarious to see. He'd just run up in a waddle to the ice edge and plunge into the water. So quick! We also saw a couple seals swimming around in the open water of the ice cracks.