Seals, hard to capture whales, penguins on ice, penguins in rookeries, penguins as mountainclimbers high on top of hills, penguins diving, crabeater seals.
The photo of the hillside without any evident wildlife in sight actually does have thousands...all the penguins are covering the black hill like tiny dots - all the way against the backdrop of the glacier in the background.
Gentoo and Adelie penguins by the thousand, Humpback, Minke and Orca whales by the dozen, and Crabeater and Leopard seals on lots of ice floes...
Terns, Shags, Skuas and Petrels in the air and ashore.
All busy flying, swimming, breeding, eating and being eaten.
And then there is the penetrating hog stench of thousands of penguins colouring the rookeries pink with their droppings, providing nutrients for tenacious red tinged lichens, some mosses and sparse whisps of Antarctic grass. The plants only thrive on the peninsular, too cold and too much ice over the Continent. However, airborne spores of lichens must have been carried to some of the Dry Valleys (subfreezing, icefree deserts in parts of Antarctica) as lichens appear wherever there is a bit of bare rock,
In defence of the odourous penguin. They swim out to sea to feed and collect food for their chicks in their gullets, some forage as far as 60 miles out, some 'only' 20 miles, depending on the species. When they reach shore, they first 'clean' themselves and replace the oil lost from their feathers from a gland near their tail, and only after that little cosmetic ritual they climb steep cliffs, sometimes for hundreds of yards, to get to their young and regurgitate stored krill to feed them.
