LlamaHat: Punta Tombo

A hundred and fifty kilometers south of Peninsula Valdez is the penguin colony of Punta Tombo. It's the largest colony of Magellanic penguins on the continent, and when we visited the penguins were nesting. This meant there were not beaches full of penguins jostling one another and making a giant racket, which was what we were expecting. Instead, we found a coastal semi-desert landscape with sand and shrubs, incongruously dotted with little penguins as far as the eye could see. Turns out the little dudes nest in holes they dig in the desert, and so we were astonished to find thousands and thousands of holes (far more numerous than the visible penguins), each with a penguin incubating eggs hiding within. It was bizarre, and hilarious. Every once in a while a penguin head would pop out of a hole in the ground, and then a two-foot-tall resident would waddle out. They walk like toddlers, a little unsteadily but inexorably toward their destination, which in this case was either the sea or their nest, depending on which way they were walking. They were completely unperturbed by the presence of humans, often crossing the path through the landscape created for us mere steps ahead of where we were, or standing just inches from where we walked. It was phenomenal and surreal. Of the wildlife we've seen on this trip, these little guys win the prize for being most susceptible to anthropomorphic attribution.

Herewith, a few of the zillion photos I took. (It's amazing how many photos one can take of what are, to the untrained eye, essentially hundreds of identical specimens all doing pretty much the same thing.)