Port Lockroy, Antarctic Peninsula, is a cute little station on a tiny island filled with Gentoo penguins, Snowy Sheathbills, and girls who work selling t-shirts and post cards in the gift shop.

Port Lockroy, Antarctic Peninsula, Neumayer Channel.

They only man, or woman, the station during the Southern Hemisphere summer. Which occurs during winter for us nothernists. Can you be a hemisphere bigot? My Australian friends must have an answer to that…

In any case, it’s set in a very pretty location, on a little island , a glacier across the way.
Port Lockroy was set up by some Brits wanting to maintain their frostbitten toehold on their Antarctic ‘posession’. They had the brilliant idea to set up a secret base to watch the Nazis. I never really figure out how that would win WWII, and suspect it was either an excuse to avoid the London Blitz or some young forward thinking scientist’s opportunity to study Antarctic wildlife. Which they did for a while, and later new scientists did atmospheric studies.

They  now are a kind of museum and have all the old rooms set up looking neat and pretty like they did 60 years ago. All the old instruments and spare furniture are there, old cans and boxes of food on the shelves. The old gramophone the guys used for entertainment still works.
Like many bases, this one was left to fade slowly into cold decay, until a group of people decided to save and restore the old explorers huts including several old bases, and even the entire island of South Georgia. The Antarctic Heritage Trust is based in New Zealand and raises money for preservation of such places as Shackleton’s old hut.

Actually, in Shackleton’s old hut they found a few cases of frozen Mackinlay’s scotch that was analyzed and reverse engineered and is now sold with some of the profits going back to the Trust. I’m saving up for a bottle, it runs about $150 in the US.
These days this base receives visitors, cruise ships like MS Fram, and sometimes even private sailboats. Enough visitors  come to see the Gentoo penguins they maintain the gift shop, where they sell… gifts. T-shirts, bookmarks, books about the area and its history, and jewelry etc.

Looking at the photo of their store I realize I should have bought that umbrella with Antarctica on it… . I also missed out on a very nice t-shirt with penguins marching across the back.
They also have a Penguin Post Office.

This is the  post office of Antarctica. According to the British… (I suspect the Norwegians and Americans, at least would dispute this. Although I heard this is the best gift shop on the continent…) So we bought post cards, wrote them, bought pretty local stamps, and mailed the cards in their mail box. Then the women who work there,

after they had showered on board our ship and received some fresh fruits etc, bundled up the mail and it was taken aboard our ship. To be posted in the Falklands, I think. The cards I mailed from Port Lockroy arrived in Norway, the UK and Chicago all on the same day, two weeks after I came home… 4 1/2 weeks after they were mailed.

Penguins aren’t carrier pigeons.

The nearly extinct Carrier Penguin hard at work delivering my cards.

Gentoo penguin chicks and Snowy Sheathbills as well as some other birds I welcome you to look up on the internet, breed there. The lurking Snowy Sheathbill

is a pretty white bird with a very ugly face. It makes its living jumping on baby penguins to interrupt feedings as the parent regurgitates food into the baby’s mouth. When food spills, the baby can’t eat it up, it only eats from the parent. The parent doesn’t pick up the food, it only eats from the sea. So that food is wasted and eventually eaten up from the ground by the Sheathbill and other scavengers who don’t mind stealing baby-food from penguin chicks. My only comment is this… I couldn’t tell the difference between spilled food and penguin poop. I hope the Sheathbill can.
Many of the penguins were molting.

Sleeping, not dead.

They suddenly lose all their feathers over 10-14 days as the new ones simultaneously grow out. It’s pretty stressful for the birds and takes a lot of energy to suddenly grow an entirely new crop of feathers all at once and that fast. They seem to stand still for 12 days as it happens. They can’t go in the water because they no longer have their water and cold proof insulation until the new feathers are all in place. They can’t eat until it’s done and it’s a pretty vulnerable time for the bird. Tourists are told to give them wide berth; fortunately they seem to ignore us.

Done molting.

A group of people were able to take a kayaking tour around the pretty ice speckled water, not me. I was a bit afraid of killer whales… I didn’t want to be the first kayaker eaten up in the Antarctic. Although by the time we reached South Georgia I’d regretted my cowardice and not kayaking past the icebergs so much I kayaked there amongst the seals and King penguins. Where there are seals there are killer whales, right? Sadly, I never saw one, so won’t be making a watercolor of one of them, either.

As I left the gift shop I looked up and along the edge of the roof sat a dozen Sheathbills looking down waiting for us to leave them to their thieving ways. I had a photo of line of them along the roof edge but this picture will have to do until I find it.

As I looked around and considered walking back to the dock I heard a low growling rumble, and looking around the corner of the building to see an avalanche.

So I did get to photograph my first avalanche! If I’d stood any closer I wouldn’t have had to worry about killer whales. That is almost true. It fell, not on the island,  but off the mountain on the mainland a thin watery channel away. As you can maybe see I used a 200 mm lens so… close enough. Wish I’d filmed a movie of it, but then I couldn’t share it with you.

After this I walked back towards the boats. And this little guy started down the path after me, so I stopped and waited for it to walk close and snapped this picture.

You have to stay 5 meters away from them. (I think it’s seals that are 15 meters, but cant recall exactly.) But when they walk up to you, it’s ok. So I waited for it to get close… until I looked up.

All my MS Fram friends weren’t allowed to walk down the only path towards the penguin and her posing for me was holding up the whole show.

That gift shop was the cutest little shop… and I regret not getting that umbrella, and there was a t-shirt with a row of penguins on the back… I’ll have to go back… As you can see by this picture I’m just getting over four days of food poisoning after that packed lunch in Tierra del Fuego. Antibiotics are my friend.