Full Flight

The sight, sound and smell of over 500,000 King Penguins on the beach by the glacial rivers at St. Andrews Bay are an overwhelming and emotional experience. Photographing the penguins as they strut about with condescending curiosity is as good as it gets!

Sailors named the young King Penguins oakum boys as the brown plumage was the color of oakum, used to caulk between the timbers of sailing ships.  The young will not shed their brown fuzzy plumage and adopt the colorful slender figure of the adults until they are over a year old and ready to fledge.  The oakum boys gather in large crèches, appearing as brown ribbons amidst the chaos of gray, white and orange adults. 

The ability of the parents to come and go from the sea and locate their own chick by sound amidst the deafening cacophony of the hundreds of thousands of birds is simply amazing.