Our final Zodiac cruise before the sailing further south gave us our best glimpse of the Macaroni Penguin. This species was only just arriving at their breeding grounds, as our cruise was a really early one in the Antarctic 'Spring'. Our earlier sightings had just been a distant one on the Falkland Islands, and a small group hiding in heavy scrub from an earlier Zodiac cruise.
We were therefore delighted when a Macaroni Penguin was spotted standing on top of a very small island that we could sail close to. It certainly isn't easy taking photos from a floating Zodiac, but fortunately, a few of the images I took turned out okay.
Macaroni Penguin.
As we started to head south we saw the odd penguin porpoising through the water. These included Chinstrap, King and Gentoo. It's never easy photographing this action, as you have to 2nd guess where the penguin is going to appear, but eventually I did get a shot.
Chinstrap Penguin.
Another difficult bird to photograph were the Prion species. Several types were possibly seen, but they are extremely difficult to separate. The birds we saw early in the cruise would have been Narrow-billed Prions. The majority of the rest were almost certainly Antarctic Prions. That at least is what I am assuming here. Every day we saw many of these small birds. They flew extremely fast and the camera and myself were not generally quick enough to get shots. Eventually, towards the end of the cruise I did get better, but the following few were the first earlier successes.
Probable Antarctic Prion.
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