We had our first penguin experience in Carnley Harbour, latitude 50.84 in the Auckland Islands. There it was, a hoiho, watching us in our Zodiacs from the rocky foreshore. We cruised closer, dodging the long thick drifts of kelp flowing up through the emerald clear water, and the penguin jumped down a few rocks, giving us a better view.
It posed, flippers outstretched, waddled a little to the right and posed again, waddled back, turned three-quarters away and looked back at us over its shoulder.
Straight down the camera lenses. The photographers had a meltdown.
It’s not every day you get sunshine and a gentle breeze on Carnley Harbour. The sealing vessel the Grafton was shipwrecked here, 160 years ago almost to the day of our visit, and the survivors held on for 18 miserable months before finally managing to build a boat seaworthy enough for them to rescue themselves.
Later, at a small island in the Snares, we had our best penguin experience. Crested penguins, this time, clustered in their hundreds along the rock shelves on the leeward side, hopping their way up steep slopes into the shrubby bush above, hopping down for a swim, or just hanging.
Then, as if at some secret signal, one jumps into the water. Others waddle down to the edge and follow, and now there’s a whole flow as the middle of the massed group empties into the ocean and all the others hop along behind.
They swim a few metres off our starboard side, floating like ducks on the surface of the heaving sea. And then the same thing: one dives, others follow, within seconds they’re all gone. Half a minute passes, or maybe it’s only seconds. And almost all at once, there they are again, a couple of metres to port, 50 or more of them, all bobbing along.
The Snares rise sheer from the sea on their exposed southern side, tempting sailors to their doom with cliffs of granite and the surf raging beneath. Here and there great drifts of rubble have fallen away and lie strewn into the ocean.
Fur seals sleep alone, flopped onto whatever little bit of flattish rock they can find. As our Zodiac glides past, they wake from their sun-drenched slumber, arch their necks to get a better view, and subside. They don’t care about us.
We’d sailed due south from Bluff, just before New Year, 110 passengers and 90 crew on the Heritage Adventurer, a “boutique” cruise ship devoted to environmental tourism. Bound for Campbell Island, the Auckland Islands and the Snares, all part of New Zealand’s Subantarctic Islands, and then, in part 2 of the trip, heading up to Fiordland.
The first evening on the aft deck was filled with albatrosses and little Cape petrels, wheeling from side to side in the slipstream, sprinkling their magic, playing in the air.
Then we were into the night, with such high rolling seas that we lay in bed, listening to the groaning and the creaking, waiting in a state of nervous thrill for the next thump as the ship crested another giant wave before crashing back down into the ocean on the other side.
At Campbell Island we put on our wet weather gear – not so much for the weather as for protection from the spray in the Zodiacs – and climbed into our muck boots. A very superior form of gumboot.
We clambered through bush and met our first megaherbs. In an ecosystem defined by the storms that roar up from Antarctica, you’d expect everything growing to be small. But on “the Subs” there’s a shrub with giant pink pompoms on woody stalks that is, say the botanists who know these things, a member of the carrot family.
Also, spread throughout the islands, cabbages that don’t look like cabbages and rhubarb that’s not like rhubarb, hebes you vaguely recognise, tree daisies, giant and brilliantly coloured gentians. And orchids, which have resisted the trend to supersize and sprout delicately among the mosses.
No rocks: it’s all peat underneath, so when you fall over, there’s nothing to bash yourself on and the ground is slightly spongy. It’s like a landscape invented for some sci-fi movie: familiar, sort of, but unlikely to be this planet.
And above all this, high on the blustery slopes of the gloriously misnamed Mt Honey, the albatrosses are nesting. You see a splotch of white across the hillside and you know it can’t be a sheep, there are no sheep, but it seems almost as big as one.
There’s another, and another, and now you realise there are hundreds of them, nesting all around in their bowls of flattened tussock and soaring overhead. Southern royals, Campbell mollymawks, black-browed and white-capped mollymawks, even a rare Antipodean albatross.
Up close, the size of these birds takes your breath away. They stare past us, unmoving, with their glassy eyes and fierce brows, but just sitting there is not always a winning strategy for albatrosses: it makes them easy to kill. Humans knew it, in times past, and mice know it now.
The mice arrived on Campbell Island with an intrepid but idiotic farming experiment last century. They attack nesting albatrosses by scampering up their bodies, scalping them and eating their brains.
Sorry. I mention it because the Maukahuka Pest Free Auckland Island project is working hard to make these island predator-free and it desperately needs donations.
The Subs are a Unesco World Heritage Site and at every beach and on every track there is not a single piece of rubbish. DoC controls the visitor numbers and each visitor pays a fee that helps with the predator control: it’s priced into your cruise ticket.
From time to time, as we hunker down on the steep slopes, an albatross will stand up, spread its wings and take a step into the wind. Wings crooked, head looking about; the legs paddling hard, like rudders in the air, getting the trajectory right. Then they’re away. Wings stretched wide now, sweeping along the slope, up the valley and over the lip of the cliff, hanging and soaring in endless majesty. They don’t seem to move a muscle: an albatross on the updraught uses less energy than it would sitting on the sea.
But when they come clumping in to land, more often than not they get it wrong and have to go round again.
Pity the people who tried to live here. Archaeological evidence suggests there were Polynesian settlements from the time of the great voyages of the 13th century. Much later, British settlers came to Auckland Island’s Port Ross, formerly known as Sarah’s Bosom, lured by the promise of a “mild and temperate climate” and “extensive plains covered with beautiful grass”.
It was all lies. There weren’t even any seals: they’d been wiped out and there weren’t many whales left, either. One woman shot her brother in a fury; the doctor was a drunk who had to be locked up. There’s still a small cemetery, where some of the graves belong to children, but no buildings at all. We walk down the remains of streets in a gloomy forest of twisted, windswept rata. The wild weather never stopped.
There were many twitchers on our boat, in their happy place with their huge camera lenses. And why wouldn’t they be? At least 11 per cent of the world’s entire population of seabirds breed in the Subs and 120 different species have been spotted there. There are also 15 known species of endemic land birds, including a snipe discovered only in 1997.
Others on board came for the wrecks and peered hopefully at the rocks where the ships had run aground. We had botany buffs and history nuts and others who just wanted to experience this wild and wonderful corner of the world.
The captain was a taciturn Finn who struggles a little with his jokes but warmed many hearts by keeping his bridge open 24/7. It was so exciting to stand up there watching the spray smash into the windows.
The guides were scientists, conservationists and adventurers, each of them with tales to tell about the flora and fauna, the geology and geography, the history and the magic of the place. Their on-board lectures were splendid. And the biosecurity they enforced on the boat was brilliantly comprehensive: every day before setting out, we scrubbed every shoe sole and bit of velcro in our gear with toothbrushes; on every return there was boot washing and more scrubbing.
There were polar swims: a very quick jump, gasp and shout, and out. Every cabin had a window, at every meal there were mountains of food and most days there were three expeditions to choose from: a serious tramp, a shorter walk and a coastal exploration in a Zodiac. You could go all out one day and take it easy the next, and on both you’d discover something special.
Nothing was quite as special as Enderby Island, where Heritage boss Aaron Russ promised we would see “more sex and violence than in a Tarantino movie”. He was talking about sea lions.
It was another fine day and Sandy Bay was packed with the endangered New Zealand species. They’d arrived in late spring, converging from around the Southern Ocean and “hauling out” of the water for a good sleep.
Well, sort of. In between sleeping, the males rear up and bash at each other, reaching with their horrifying gaping mouths to try to sink their viciously jagged teeth into each other’s necks.
This sorts out which of them will become the season’s dominant bulls, who then corral a bunch of females into a harem. The size difference is immense: males can weigh up to 450kg while females don’t grow larger than about 160kg.
Meanwhile, the females give birth. Very shortly after, the bulls impregnate them again, in a process that goes on forever, although sea lions, like stoats and kangaroos, practice “embryonic diopause”: the pregnancy doesn’t develop until later.
The bulls guard their harems and the females try to guard their pups against males randomly crushing them. The other males hang about looking for something to do: another fight, a chance to sneak past the bull, a chance to chase a female into the sea. Packs of them do that, sometimes drowning the hapless new mother.
Do they show us the awful naked truth about our mammalian lives, or are sea lions the very thing we have evolved not to be?
Sea lions can flop their way kilometres inland and they often do: defeated males driven away from the group; females and their pups seeking sanctuary from it. You’ll be photographing a field of megaherbs and an angry black monster will suddenly rear up in front of you.
If you think we have no large and dangerous wild animals in this country, you have not met a sea lion.
The wonderful thing about Enderby is that you can escape all that. Through the great drifting forests of the rata, over the plains of megaherbs beyond, on a boardwalk that takes you right across the island to the tops of vast cliffs above the open ocean, where you discover the lightly mantled sooty albatross.
Graceful and coloured all over in soft luxurious greys, they hang and soar, like every other albatross in flight, but here, they do it in pairs and even in triplets.
In the midst of this stupendous scenery, these beautiful birds seem lost in the exhilaration of their dance, right there in front of you and over your head, and you get to watch.
Coming soon: Part 2 - Fiordland from the sea
Checklist: THE SUBANTARCTIC ISLANDS
GETTING THERE
Heritage Expeditions assembles passengers in Queenstown and Invercargill for a bus trip to the ship which departs from Bluff.
DETAILS