South Georgia News Snippet

March started with two days of gentoo penguin chick counts across the island. An encouraging increase on last year’s figures with 1996 nests and 1634 chicks in total - not a great number but better than last year’s disastrous counts. We also weighed gentoo chicks at Johnson Beach, a messy job involving five field assistants, two nets, one hundred penguin chicks and an awful, awful lot of mud and muck! We were lucky enough to find a leucistic (or Isabeline) gentoo. This is a rare condition in which there is a shortage of melanin (a dark pigment) in the bird, leaving it looking like it has been through the hot wash!

Source: South Georgia Newsletter March 2010