The island of South Georgia has to be one of the most astonishing places on Earth, with the unbelievable quantity of megafauna found on this small landmass.
Tens of thousands of king penguins, the second largest penguin species, crowd into colonies hard to fathom. As well as the penguins hundreds of southern elephant seals and Antarctic fur seals also crowd the beaches.
It is easy to land and just start shooting thousands of photos everywhere you look. However these photos will likely look the same as thousands of others taken by people who have been there. Stop and look, take it in, walk around a bit and think about what you want to capture was the sound advice I was given. Then start isolating birds and images you want to capture in the over-whelming scenes in front of you.
I do hope I have managed to capture some images here that give you an idea of the grandeur of the scenes that greet you of the kings in South Georgia. Then there are the more intimate moments with individuals or parents with young, spotted among the tens of thousands of birds in this mind-blowing natural spectacle.
We can all only hope that these wonders can survive the massive human impact on the planet and in particular climate change. Once the waters around South Georgia were home to the largest whales on Earth as the biggest blues were hunted here. The bays remain scarce of whales, though numbers are increasing of many species, they are nothing like they were pre-industrial whaling. But the huge recovery of penguins and seals on South Georgia after hunting of them was stopped shows how productive this area of ocean is, and we can only hope it remains this way.
