The Magellanic Penguins of Gypsy Cove, Port Stanley, Falkland Islands

Jan 25th, 2007 | By admin | Category: Travel Journal

It was our busiest day yet in Port Stanley with three cruise ships visiting on the same day, bringing 4000 or more visitors. A local company provides a shuttle service to Gypsy Cove, a nearby bay home to a colony of Magellanic Penguins. Along the way we passed by several shipwrecks including the rusty but otherwise nearly intact Lady Elizabeth in Whale Bone Cove. It was a cold bleak day with a howling, icy wind, more like the middle of winter than summer.

The bus dropped us in a small gravel car park. The beach was a wide, white streak between the grey sky and the dark sea. There was a small tea shop run by a Filipina lady, and the start of the cliff top walk. The beach was fenced off because of land mines left over from the war, and it’s because people don’t go down to the sand that the penguins nest here. I have read that the land mines are made of plastic and therefore undetectable, and that the penguins are light enough to walk over them without setting them off. The lady in the tea shop told us the machines used to detect the mines didn’t work so they just fenced the area off.

There was a large group of penguins huddled together in the distance on the beach, and a solitary King Penguin in the distance that the warden told us was lost and wouldn’t join the group. Walking along the cliff top I could see lots of burrows in the soil (Magellanic Penguins are the only burrowing penguin species) but only a few penguins, huddled against the biting wind. It seemed to be too cold even for them.