Sailing to Antarctic and Sub-Antarctic destinations involves spending days en route. For trips that involve going to multiple locations, these days of “down time” could be spent catching up on sleep or editing photos. However, even though the oceans are vast open spaces, there are still a lot of opportunities to photograph. The skies can contain numerous birds, many of which follow ships. Many hours can be spent photographing Black-Browed Albatross, Southern Giant Petrels and Wandering Albatross as they effortlessly fly past. The photograph shows a Wandering Albatross. Wandering Albatross are the largest flying birds, with wingspans reaching 2.5 to 3.5m. The photo was taken at the following coordinates which you can paste into Google Earth:

52 26.778S 049 29.911W

It’s not a great picture but what caught my eye was the flash of red. Looking at the image on a computer, the bird had a red tag with the number L97. My wife also had photographs showing the tag identification so we talked to Chris Edwards who was the Expedition leader. Chris has spent quite a bit of time in Antarctica and his son, Ewan, is stationed at Bird Island, which has a population of Wandering Albatross. We gave Chris copies of the photograph and the GPS location and he forwarded them to his son. Here is the information on the bird:

“The bird was ringed in 1990 on Bird Island, presumably as a chick. It departed and returned during the 1994-1999 summers as a non-breeder. It bred in 2000 but not since then, possibly because its mate had not returned.”

That’s pretty amazing that we can see a bird in the middle of no-where and then find out quite a bit about its history.