The Galápagos of the Southern Ocean - Part II: Enderby Island

After two stormy days at sea, heading into the prevailing swell and passing the tiny island group of the Snares, we wake to a calm morning in the sheltered waters of Port Ross. 460 kilometres south of New Zealand, Enderby Island lies at the northern end of the Auckland Islands group. The island's western edge bears the brunt of the prevailing weather. These precipitous cliffs of volcanic rock are relentlessly pummeled by powerful waves. This rugged coast is home to a colony of Auckland Islands shags. These cormorants are endemic to this island group. Enderby Island is definitely one of the most interesting islands in the New Zealand sub-Antarctics. It's a bit of a success story. Most of the sub-Antarctic islands that we've this trip have a history of introduction of land mammals, and all these islands evolved without native land mammals, so the local populations suffered immensely. A number of eradications have taken place in the last 10 or 20 years, and some of them have been successful, and Enderby is a great case in point. It had cattle, rabbits and mice on it, which were all eradicated in 1994, and since then there's been an obvious return of the native flora and fauna to Enderby Island, and it's been really uplifting to observe. Everybody was just fascinated with the little Auckland Island pippets that were basically pecking around at their boots and completely fearless. The birds that are going to take longer to come back are the burrowing seabirds. Every year there's more and more sign of the burrowing seabirds coming back to breed on Enderby, and it's exciting to think that in 20 or 30 years there'll be burrows all over the island like it was 200 years ago. These banded dotterells are among the rarest land birds of the Auckland Islands. The Auckland Islands have almost one third of the world's population of yellow-eyed penguins. 500 breeding pairs live in the Port Ross area, and on Enderby Island in particular. The yellow-eyed penguin is a very unique penguin. It's in a genus of its own. It breeds singly in the forest, underneath the ratta forest. It's very shy of humans. It will run away if you get within 10 meters of it in most cases. Enderby is a stronghold for the yellow-eyed penguin, and they were in great numbers actually on the walk we did around Enderby. I saw probably 45 to 50 birds, which is the highest count I think I've ever had in the many walks I've done around Enderby, and whether that's just a seasonal thing that they were more prominent at this time of the year, I'm not sure, but it was very good to see the large numbers of yellow-eyed penguins. The low-lying plant life is testament to the strong persistent westerly winds. Megaherbs now flourish in the peaty soils since the eradication of introduced mammals. These latitudes are the southern limit of the red-flowering southern ratta, which grows in stunted twisted forests on the sheltered southern and eastern coasts of Enderby Island. Sea lions are known to wander deep into these forests. The New Zealand sea lion is the rarest of all the seals. There's a limited population due to a bottleneck event that happened some years ago where the population was taken down to quite a small number of individuals. They're coming back now, which is good to see, but from all the studies that I've seen, their populations are still in a bit of trouble. They're the most threatened sea lion in the world, vulnerable to mass mortality events such as in 1998. Bacterial infection killed 60% of that season's pups and many adults, which was surely a boon for these scavenging sub-Antarctic skua. Perhaps less than 10,000 New Zealand sea lions remain today. Encouragingly though, 2013 had the highest pup count in five years. At the moment the males are coming onto the beaches and basically determining who's the strongest out of them to create territories, and within those territories the females will come along, choose a male to breed with, and he'll hold small harems of females, up to about 20 females for the lucky and stronger of the males. The large male we see at the island's main rookery may weigh up to half a ton. The female will then basically give birth to a single pup. She'll stay on the beach for about eight to ten days and mate with the male in that territory. She'll then go out to sea and go foraging to enable her to produce milk for the pup throughout the season. So she does that for probably about four or five months. What we should be seeing on our next trip out to Enderby Island is the real beginning of the breeding season, and for those passengers who did the longer walk they saw the first sea lion pup, which was quite interesting because it was so early, but we expect to see a lot more pups on our next visit. Enderby Island may have revealed to us its riches of sub-antarctic wildlife, but really the journey has only just begun. For more Journeys to the Ice, visit sciblogs.co.nz forward slash journeys to the ice