Falkland is my (wildlife) photographic home and after so many visits and so many workshops down there, you might think, that it might get boring.

Falkland never gets boring and this year was not only for the participants of my workshop but also for me extraordinary!

I have never seen so many penguin species, so many different and rarely seen behaviour of the wildlife, had hardly so little rain  and unfortunately never waited so long for the flight back due to again extraordinary weather conditions. This workshop could fill two blogs with content easily.......

It is hard to find a beginning. Lets start with the obvious, the penguins. Penguins are probably the reason why most photographers come to the Falkland Islands. Most subantarctic penguin species are during January in their colonies, the chicks are half grown and lots of feeding is going on. Only the King Penguins are the exception to the rule, as their chicks are just hatching, but the colony is full of birds as well.

There have never been as much penguin species as this year on the Falklands. Somewhere on the islands even a Chinstrap and a Little Blue was spotted. We did not see these two extremely rare visitors, but we could watch another very rare visitor, which settled now for the third consecutive year to breed amongst and with its closest relatives the southern rockhoppers. This Moseley's penguins home, at least for now, is Bleaker Island and it breeds at exactly the same spot as two years ago. I do not know whether to breeding was succesfull, but as the two species are really closely related it is quite likely.

In recent years it became more and more common to find another crested penguin in the Falklands, the Macaroni penguin. Again on Bleaker we had several Macaronis and some are successfully interbreeding with the local Southern Rockhoppers. Whether the offspring will be able to breed successfully will be seen in the future. Nature will decide and perhaps Bleaker will be home of a new sub(?) species. Some visitors call them already by the name Rockaronies.

Southern Rockhoppers are the favourite penguins for many people visiting the Falklands. They are noisy, agile, curious and ignore humans more or less completely. Their "landing procedures" are amazing and proof, that penguins can fly....

We could spend many hours in four different colonies and each is offering different photographic opportunities. It is really rewarding to change locations, that is true for the Rockies and this year even more for another penguin species. More about this later! First a small collection of Rockhopper pictures!

Gentoos are nearly ubiquitous in the Falklands, most wildlife locations have at least some breeding pairs and at all of our workshop locations you can watch Gentoos in colonies ranging from small breeding groups to real Gentoo penguin cities. The amazing thing this year was not the amount of locations or the number of Gentoos, it was the different stage in the breeding cycle the different colonies have been in and the difference in the respective behaviour.But also the effects of the number of predators around have been so different in each of our locations.

Incredible, in one colony you could find parents sitting on the eggs of the second clutch, which is more or less as it has been all the years. In other colonies nearly all gentoo chicks where close to changing their plumage and where "forced" by their parents to get used to their future wet environment. We never had this before.

Same story with predation. In one colony predators like skuas or caracaras where constantly attacking chicks and parents in others there was complete peace! Amazing and very interesting to watch.

As I said in the beginning, the Falklands never get boring for photographers.

Gentoos had been hit hard by bird flu in some locations, but this year the birds and we had been lucky. There had been some cases, but none of the major beaches and none of our locations had to be closed this season. Bird flu was one of my big concerns when preparing and guiding this workshop. If locations like Sea Lion or The Neck would have been closed for visitors, it is nearly impossible to find alternatives. These locations are unique....

When guiding my last workshop in 2024 Sea Lion was affected and the same happened the next year. This year there was no case at least as long as we have been on the island. There are still many Gentoos around and I am sure they will recover quickly. Fascinating was, that the (sub) colonies which had been affected in the past, had been deserted completely. Not that all birds would have ben perished, but they moved their homes to another spot.

Gentoos are known for the behaviour to move colonies a bit and I have witnessed this before already on Bleaker and Sea Lion. Strange that it never happened in The Neck, but down there, they do not have any option to move, I guess. But on Bleaker there are many suitable hills around and Sea Lion has many options as well. But the last move of a whole colony seems to be related to the past outbreak of bird flu. It is said that the birds move as soon as there are to many pests around. But a virus is no pest they would recognize as a threat. But somehow they knew that it might be a good idea to move camp..... Amazing!

Now some words and pictures about predation. In the big penguin colonies predation is omnipresent. But there are differences, much bigger than I thought. Colonies at Gypsy Cove had no (visible) predation at all, just like Whale Point. I visited both colonies for the first time and was really amazed about this fact. Both colonies are rather small and seem not to have local predators, which rear their young nearby. But I really do not know and thats the only reason I can imagine.

In the big colonies of penguins or shags on Sea Lion, Bleaker and Saunders predation is everywhere. Thats really important to understand as a visitor. If you are to close to a nest and the adult is pushed away by you, the egg or chick will be dead, thats for sure!

The main predators in and around the colonies are Striated Caracas, Giant Petrels, Falkland Skus and Turkey Vultures (they really do active predation!). At and on the beaches attacks by male Sea Lions are getting more and more common.

In the past I had often seen predators snachting eggs or smaller chicks and of course taking whatever carrion they could find. But this year we could watch predation on nearly grown up chicks by Skuas, Caracaras and Giant Petrels and that was a very different story. It took hours, really hours, until the unfortunate chick was really dead. It was hard to watch..... We witnessed it on Sea Lion and at The Neck, life for a chick is not a walk in the park! And I spare you the real gory pictures....

First is a sequence involving Striated Caracaras and Giant Petrels and it lasted for at least 3 hours!

Now two examples involving only Skuas. The first is typical and it shows the other roles of predators. It snatches an already dead chick from the middle of a colony, which died probably from natural causes. The second was hard to watch and hard to explain, as it happened in the middle of a big creche. But the other chicks did not defend the doomed chick, for whatever reason. As it seems they defend themselvs as a group, but not any individuals, which are attacked. That was and is my interpretation.

Whenever you are close to chicks or a nest, be aware of your responsibility. All the predators have their chicks too, but you shall not be the reason for a disturbance resulting in a kill.

But also do not interfere, let nature take its course!

Back to the more cute side of Falkland Island wildlife photography, back to the penguins. I talked about Gentoos and the Crested Penguins, now Magellanic and Kings are the last species I can mention from this trip.

For whatever reason I did not spend much time with Magellanic and Kings. One reason was that I could not stay in the Volunteer Shanty (my group could) and Volunteer is best for Kings and also good for Magellanic. Moreover the numbers of Magellanic seem to have shrinked on Sea Lion, probably again due to bird flu. But I still can share some pics. As you will see, the chicks of the Kings had just hatched, thats always very special to watch the emergence of the next generation....

Falkland wildlife is mostly about birds. The most common mammal is - the Falkland Merino Sheep..... Native mammls are oinly from the seal family. We had a good time with South American Sea Lions and Southern Elephant Seals. Fur seals do exist, but the colonies are extremely hard to access.

It was good  to see, that the Sea Lion colony on Bleaker is now a breeding colony. This colony is better for photography than the colony on Sea Lion Island, but be careful and stay on the cliff edge in the tussock. During our first visit the colony was extremely nervous. We had been careful, did not move much, stayed close to the ground and up on the cliff, but nevertheless suddenly some seal panicked a bit and fled into the water. I told Nick how nervous they had been and the answer was surprising.... He told me: oh its a rainy day, they are always super nervous when it is raining or about to rain. When we visited the colony for the second time, we had been even more carefull and it was sunny. And the seals did not bother at all, everything was very relaxed!

Nevertheless, be careful when approaching the seals, and even more careful when it is rainy....

As usual we stayed on Sea Lion Island as our main location for Elephant Seals, but due to the cancelled flights back to Punta Arenas we could visit a second colony at Whale Point. At this time of a year, the (male) seals are more or less lazy and try to shed their old fur. But from time to time some bulls engange in fights to establish a pecking order and to train their fighting skills. This year, probably as a result of the warm and sunny weather, lots of fighting took place in the surf.

Fighting is common, but most of the time their life on the beach looks like this, beach bodies Elephant Seal style! (they do not go back to the sea for feeding, until the moult is finished...)

Elephant Seals are quite peacefull, but all the same some care should be taken. An accidental blow by their tail fin is for sure not much fun! The story is a bit different during the mating season. Elephant Seals may not have the "cuteness factor" of a penguin, but they have a certain charm.

Whats left to show? Albatrosses, for sure, but also two cormorant species, all the ducks and geese and of course the many small birds fluttering around. I love the ducks and the geese, even if they do not get much "love" from most photographers visiting the islands.

This year I could even add another duck species to my list, the Chiloe wigeon, a very pretty duck!

At this time of the year ducklings are all around, very cute, really nice and rewarding for any photographer.

Since more and more islands join the exclusive club of being rat and cat free, it is more and more rewarding to focus also on the many smaller birds around. Of course it is more difficult to photograph as they can fly (in the air, not only under water) and often do what most birds do, they fly away.... Shocking if you are used to the flightless species on the Falklands....

Now only Cormorants and Albatrosses are left. As this blog is already a bit to long and with way to many pictures (but I could have added easily two or three times more of at least the same quality....), I keep it now brief. First the shags. The King Shags had been a bit surprising. As with gentoos their development stages where very different in the colonies we visited and even within a colony we found chicks still bound to a nest, while others already tried to take off. Again a new experience and a great photographic opportunity!

Finally Albatrosses. There is probably no better place in the world to watch and to take pictures of albtrosses than the Falklands. It is only one species, the Black browed albatrosses. Even in the Falklands you find very few places to watch them, but as soon as you are there, the experience is something very special! Penguins are kind of messy feeders, their plumage is dirty as soon as they feed their young from the very first moment. Albatrosses are different they are immaculate!

The chicks are residing in their tower shaped nests and wait to be fed by the adults. Even their nests are special, I do not know any other bird, which is building towers to lift their young up from the muddy and badly ventilated ground. The increasing heat however is a big threat for the chicks and we saw them suffer from the merciless sun. The Falklands are getting hotter and hotter putting lots of stress not only on the albatrosses but also on other subantarctic birds!

We had quite hot days during our stay in the Neck and the Albatross chicks where panting heavily. Suzan told me, that more Albatross chicks are now dying from heat related stress than from predation or any other illness!

Anyway Albatrosses are simply great birds!

A few final words. Mybe you have read it between the lines. Our flight back to the continent was delayed two times, 4 full days in total! Strong and sometimes stormy northerly winds blowing for 4 consecutive days, brought all air traffic to a standstill on MP Airport. We tried to make the best out of the situation and managed to visit two very interesting locations while being stuck in Stanley. It seems to be a newer weather pattern. It was hardly known about 10 years ago, that flights got cancelled due to inclement weather and stormy winds from the wrong direction. But now, it is getting more and more likely. I guess we have to adopt to this new situation. If you go to the Falklands do not go just for a week.....

This was my first blog for 2026 and the next will follow soon. I just returned from an amazing trip to northern Scandinavia, but it will be a few weeks until it will be online. As usual drop me a line if you have questions. And if you are interested to visit the Falklands we have another workshop in October 2026!

Munich, March 2026

Wir sind jetzt wieder regelmäßig auf den Fototagen und Reisemessen unterwegs. Wenn Ihr wollt besucht uns, ich werde in Fürstenfeldbruck wie üblich vor Ort sein und auch dieses Jahr eine kleine Ausstellung haben. Die nächsten Messen sind:

Naturfototage Fürstenfeldbruck: 24. - 26.04.2026

Norddeutsche Naturfototage: 08. - 10.05.2026

Wer kurzentschlossen auf die Falklands und Südgeorgien will, wir haben noch einige Plätze auf der Subantarktis Herbsttour 2026 frei. 4 Wochen in der Subantarktis! Links zu dieser und allen anderen Reisen im nächsten Abschnitt!