At Macquarie Island, just living here is as though we are the lucky participants of a Nature Documentary every day. The boulders lying around station have eyes and growl and sound like dinosaurs (the eli seals), the carnivorous birds lazily glide across station assessing us to see if we’re a viable meal option, and the gentoo penguins decide to situate themselves in the most inconvenient of places – usually on roads, paths and around buildings. And this is just during winter - we can’t wait to see what spring has in store.
We soon grow accustomed to those sightings. Although are sometimes still surprised when walking around station in a world of our own and the closest boulder decides to wake up and growl at us. But I don’t think we’ll ever become accustomed or blasé about the semi-regular visits from our resident Orca pod.
This week, just after lunch on Wednesday, they visited us again, this time spending nearly an hour cavorting just off the coast on the east side of station. We believe there were about 9 whales, including two young calves. They were intermittently splashing, circling, approaching really close to shore, swimming over the top of each other, rolling onto their sides or backs, and the calves were doing tail flips. Being a relatively calm day, we even saw their beautiful black and white markings as they stealthily moved under the water between Buckles Bay (east coast off south end of station) into Garden Bay, a beautiful little cove which is overlooked by the Ham Shack, a hut on Hut Hill, which was for many the view point of this most incredible of experiences. We can’t decide whether they were just playing, feeding on schools of fish, or teaching the calves to hunt. Either way, it was the most extraordinary show and an amazing privilege to be able to see these apex predators up close and personal in ‘family mode’, and all just as part of our regular work day.
Amongst the excitement with did manage to take some videos, maybe not the best quality but I do think they go some way towards showing you what a little visit from our favourite neighbours was like. We can’t wait for their next one!
Bec J, SL
