Chinstrap Penguins

Landed on Antarctica this morning at a place called Brown Bluff, just tucked in on the east side of the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula. Beautiful scenery with ice sculptures floating in the water and the land covered in glaciers, with occasional black cliffs where the the ground is too steep for the ice. Brown bluff is one such cliff with a pebble beach at its foot where we could land.  Most of the coast line is vertical seracs where the glaciers just pour off the land into the sea. The beach at Brown Bluff has loads of chinstrap and gentoo penguins, with a rather pervasive lingering smell that clings to your cloths! Pied petrels soared around the cliff-tops and a beautiful white petrel was nesting under a boulder. This afternoon went across to an island opposite Brown Bluff where there were 3,000 chinstraps roosting. A bunch of them were standing around on a large ice-floe and had to leap into the water to get off, from a height of about 12'.  So today's blip is a chinstrap penguin leaping off an ice-floe. Who said penguins can't fly?