Brown Bluff: Adélie Penguins, a Calving Glacier, and a Leopard Seal Hunt in Antarctica

Back when I wrote about our first day in Antarctica, I said the submarine dive and two penguin species felt like the most extraordinary day of the trip at the time, and that everything after it made that day look small by comparison. This was the day that actually earned that title.

Brown Bluff was our final stop in Antarctica proper, near the very northern tip of the peninsula, and it's a genuinely strange piece of geology before a single penguin ever enters the picture. The cliffs formed from a volcanic eruption that happened under a glacier, a type of formation called a tuya, and the result is this looming, rust-colored wall rising straight up out of the beach. It's also home to roughly 20,000 breeding pairs of Adélie penguins, plus a much smaller colony of Gentoos. Penguin chicks had begun hatching as well, and the cuteness only increased along with the numbers.

Gentoo penguin feeding a recently hatched chick

This was the day the penguin numbers really exploded, and they only kept climbing from here. It was also my first real introduction to Adélies, which might be the single most adorable penguin species that exists. One of our naturalists explained something I hadn't understood before this trip: different penguin species don't actually interact with each other. Beyond standing upright, waddling, and having flippers, they're not particularly closely related, and their behavior is completely different species to species. We'd see that even more dramatically once we got to South Georgia and started seeing king penguins, but Brown Bluff was the first real proof of it. Gentoos build elaborate little nests and steal pebbles from each other as a kind of courtship ritual. Adélies run up and down the coastline in enormous groups, looking for a safe place to enter the water, then move on together to the next spot. They're not solo animals in the least. The handful of times a lone Adélie wandered through a crowd of Gentoos was genuinely the funniest thing I saw on the whole trip, both species completely ignoring each other like strangers who happen to be standing at the same bus stop.

Gentoo and Adelie penguins don’t know what to do with each other

Two things happened while we stood on that beach that I'll never forget.

First, a glacier calved somewhere in the distance, sending a small wave toward shore, maybe a foot or two high by the time it reached us, but enough to matter. We saw it before we heard it, the sound arriving a few seconds behind the sight because of how far away it actually was. The Adélies didn't react right away either. They kept trying to work their way into the water until the wave actually hit the shoreline, and then all at once, they turned and ran up the beach together in one enormous, squawking mass.

Second, and this is the part I still think about: leopard seals were hunting in the water that day, which is exactly why Adélies enter the ocean in groups to begin with, strength in numbers against precisely this kind of threat. While we were there, one of the leopard seals caught and ate a penguin.

Seabourn has a photographer and videographer out with the expedition team every single day, and at the end of the trip, you get a fully edited video of the whole expedition, scored with music, thirty to forty-five minutes long. It's one of the best souvenirs I've ever gotten from any trip. Ours includes the entire leopard seal attack, captured on a drone in real time. I'm not posting that footage here, it's genuinely graphic, but if anyone wants to see it, email me and I'm happy to share the full video. Nobody wants to watch a seal eat a penguin. It's also exactly how the ecosystem down there actually works, and there was something powerful about seeing it happen in real time instead of just reading about it in a book.

I don’t have that moment on video, by the way. I distinctly remember thinking “I can either record the tsunami hitting, or I can watch it.” I decided to stand there and watch it. It may look like I recorded everything from Antarctica, but believe me, I didn’t. There were so many unbelievable moments that I simply observed and appreciated, and while yes, I’d like to see them again now, I also appreciate the way I handled it then. I was truly present at that moment. Just me, the rest of the crew and guests of Seabourn Venture, and a few hundred scared Adélies' running from the water.

An Adélies penguin in Antarctica

It was, somehow, a perfect final day in Antarctica. Two full sea days lay ahead of us next, on our way to South Georgia.