Watching Rockhopper Penguins Earn Their Name on New Island

A Rockhopper penguin in the Falklands

I'd been saying "rockhopper" since the day before, and but it really hadn’t fully clicked yet why they're called that.

New Island was our final stop of the entire trip. The hike out was another long one out to see what made the island famous - an enormous rockhopper colony with chicks everywhere you looked. Watching the adults climb, it finally made sense. Rockhoppers hop straight up rocky, near-vertical terrain instead of waddling around it the way every other penguin does. The name is a literal description. Just watch the video below and you’ll see what I mean.

The rockhoppers share these cliffs with more black-browed albatrosses than I could possibly count, nesting right alongside them. Imperial shags, known elsewhere as blue-eyed shags or just cormorants, were nesting there too, all mixed together just as we’d seen the day before. Skuas and snowy sheathbills were circling for a chance to steal an egg, while the albatrosses and shags were simply neighbors.

Rockhopper penguins share a cliffside with snowy sheathbills in the Falklands

It was an amazing hike on a beautiful stretch of coastline, and a perfect way to close out the Falklands. From there it was back on the ship for two more days, though closer to a day and a half of actual sailing to Ushuaia, since just like on the way south, the schedule was padded for exactly the kind of unpredictability that had shaped this entire trip.