Life Through a lens Bryan Thomas Bird Photographer: ANTARCTICA

Best place I've ever been too, If you ever get the chance to go there grab it, here's some of my photograph's of my visits there.

South Georgia is an island in the southern Atlantic Ocean that is part of the British Overseas territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. The main settlement is Grytviken. South Georgia is 167.4 kilometres long and 1.4 to 37 km wide, it has also has a large colony of up to 60,000 King Penguins at Salisbury Plane.

Above
King Penguin's

The Petrel
Old whaling boat a reminder of our shameful past
South Georgia

Antarctic fur Sea
Happy Days
warm in the Sun

Above

Wilson's storm Petrel

Madeiran storm Petrel

White bellied storm Petrel

Leach's storm Petrel

Antarctic Fulmar

Wandering Albatross

Antarctic Shag

Sub Antarctic Skua

Leopard Seal

Icebergs and Ice Shapes

Moody sea

Snow Petrel
Snow petrels are pure white birds with jet black beaks and eyes. They are the size of a pigeon and arguably the most beautiful of all the Antarctic birds, the most sort after for your list.

Despite their diminutive size are as tough as animal needs to be to survive and even thrive in low temperatures and with a frequently high wind chill.

Cape Petrel

Adelie Penguin

Southern royal Albatross

Sooty Albatross

Yellow nosed Albatross

Sooty Albatross

Black browed Albatross

Wandering Albatross

On the nest

Pairs of wandering albatrosses mate for life and

breed every two years. Breeding takes place on

subantarctic islands and commences in early November.

The nest is a mound of mud and vegetation, and is

placed on an exposed ridge near the sea. During the

early stages of the chick's development, the parents

take turns sitting on the nest while the other searches

for food. Later, both adults hunt for food and visit the chick at irregular intervals.

Wandering albatross has the longest wingspan of

any living bird, typically ranging from 2.51 to 3.5 m

(8 ft 3 in to 11 ft 6 in), with a mean span of 3.1 m

(10 ft 2 in) in the Bird Island, South Georgia

The longest-winged examples verified have been

about 3.7 m (12 ft 2 in) Even larger examples have

been claimed, with two giants reportedly

measuring 4.22 m (13 ft 10 in) and 5.3 m (17 ft 5 in)

but these reports remain unverified

The Greeting

Wandering Albatross

Yellow nosed Albatross

Above
Tristan Albatross

Tristan albatrosses are endemic to the islands of the Tristan da Cunha group and more specifically Gough Island. The majority of the world's population nest on Gough Island, around 1500 pairs. On some years a pair breeds on Inaccessible Island.

Inaccessible flightless Rail

The Inaccessible Island Rail is perhaps the coolest bird that I will ever see. The world’s smallest, still-extant, flightless bird is only found on the aptly-named Inaccessible Island, an island in the Tristan da Cunha archipelago of the south Atlantic Ocean (the largest island in the archipelago is also called Tristan da Cunha but people from the UK will recognize it as St. Helena. The island is not only inaccessible because of its remote location but also because of the huge cliffs that ring the island, making access to the interior, where Atlantisia rogersi lives, almost as difficult as getting to the island.

How does an Inaccessible flightless Rail survive? Well, the sixteen square kilometers of Inaccessible Island on which it lives host, according to the most recent estimates, about 8,400 individuals. BirdLife International believes that this might be maximum population the species can reach, as it seems to completely saturate its range.

In general it prefers areas where vegetation, boulders or other landscape features at ground level provide tunnels in which to shelter and to breed. It forages in every available habitat including very short vegetation, boulder beaches and marshy areas…The diet comprises a wide range of invertebrates including earthworms and moths, centipedes, and a wide variety of insects and insect larvae, as well as berries and seeds.

The diminutive and flightless rail which lives on Inaccessible Island and, as far as is known, nowhere else in the Atlantic, or for that matter in the whole world, is in fact not even generically allied to the moorhen-like gallinules just referred to. It is a true rail ; and besides this there is nothing specifically like it known to science, although it may be that certain rails living on islands in the Pacific Ocean may have sprung from the same original stock. It was for these and other reasons, that is referred to an entirely new genus and species, and being naming it in honour of Mr. Rogers, who was the first to procure specimens of it with the object of making it known to science.

Below
Kerguelen Petrel

Above

Soft plumage Petrel

Above

Northern giant Petrel

Below

Southern giant Petrel

Above

Spectacled Petrel

Below

Broad billed Pryon

Above and below

Brown Booby

Below

Masked Booby

Black Noddy

Below

Brown Noddy

The brown noddy is a colonial bird, usually nesting on cliffs, trees, or bushes. It occasionally lays its eggs on the bare ground. The nest itself is usually a platform nest, made of sticks and twigs.

Above

Fairy Tern

Above

Arctic Tern

During the southern summer, it can be found at sea, reaching the northern edge of the Antarctic ice. The Arctic tern is famous for its migration; it flies from its Arctic breeding grounds to the Antarctic and back again each year, the shortest distance between these areas being 19,000 km (12,000 mi).

Above

Great Shearwater
Great Shearwater, like the Sooty Shearwater, follows a circular route, moving up the eastern seaboard of first South and then North America, before crossing the Atlantic in August. It can be quite common off the south-western coasts of Great Britain and Ireland before heading back south again, this time down the eastern littoral of the Atlantic.