Hannah Point Chinstrap penguins

From my 35mm archives, Antarctica trip — Hannah Point, on the south shore of Livingston Island, was one of our Zodiac landings in Antarctica. The area is named after the Hannah of Liverpool, a ship that wrecked here in 1820 while traveling through the South Shetland Islands. The area is the site of a massive Chinstrap penguin rookery (with Gentoo penguins thrown into the mix). The fuzzy grayish-brown birds are juvenile penguins. The chicks lying on the rocks are molting, which is apparently an exhausting process. Chinstraps get their name from the thin black strips across the bottom of their throats. They may be the most abundant of penguins, with population estimates of over 7 million breeding pairs! I saw a pair of macaroni penguins (they have red beaks and hairy orange eyebrows), a nesting pair of Southern giant petrels, blue-eyes shags, skuas, and a large colony of Southern elephant seals.

Learn more about Chinstrap penguins here:

http://www.penguinworld.com/types/chinstrap.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinstrap_penguin

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