Guests and expedition staff aboard the National Geographic Explorer were treated to a rare sighting of this nearly all-white leucistic Chinstrap penguin January 9, 2012. It’s not quite an albino since it has pigmented eyes and a washed-out version of a Chinstrap penguin’s coloring pattern.
Photo by David Stephens
Naturalist David Stephens snapped this photo as the penguin waddled its way through the Aitcho Islands in Antarctica. Penguins’ two-tone black-and-white coloring offers camouflage while diving for fish, and this color is so fundamental to their success in catching fish that variations are seldom seen. “Many wondered about this unusual bird’s chances of success,” Stephens said. “While odd coloration may make fishing a bit more difficult, leucistic birds are regularly found breeding normally.”
Check out some of the more common sights aboard the National Geographic Explorer on our Journey to Antarctica expedition in this photo gallery.
By Sharon Grainger
Sharon Grainger is a naturalist who leads many departures of our Alaska’s Inside Passage expedition. Below, she recounts an incredible whale sighting on a voyage this past summer.
An hour and a half after sunrise, the National Geographic Sea Lion was cruising slowly north on Chatham Strait, searching for marine mammals. This body of water is the longest and deepest fjord in North America, extending over 150 miles and reaching depths of over 2,000 feet in several places. These rich waters attract myriad different animals in the long days of summer.
Our plans for this morning were to search for marine mammals, enjoy the fantastic weather, and see what southeast Alaska offered up from her treasure chest of natural beauty. As if on cue, humpback whales appeared in the distance. Soon the ship’s bow was filled, our guests poised with their binoculars facing north.
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Making a beignet at Café du Monde
The Big Easy’s historic French Quarter presents just one tough challenge to the weekend photographer: Deciding when to sleep. Good thing they’re brewing fresh coffee and popping beignets in the fryer 24-7 at Café du Monde.
Photojournalist and National Geographic contributing photographer Tyrone Turner kicked off NG Expeditions’ Weekend Photography Workshop in his native New Orleans with an invitation to stay up late (yes, Bourbon Street’s going all night) and get up early (how ’bout that great morning light?). Tyrone has traveled from Brazil to Baghdad on assignment, and also shot National Geographic features on New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, and the Louisiana bayou.
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Former Solidarity leader and Polish President Lech Walesa dances with National Geographic Expeditions traveler Ethel Scully.
Lech Walesa, former Solidarity leader and President of Poland, and Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the Soviet Union, meet with National Geographic Expeditions travelers on the Society’s “Exploring the Baltic’s Historic Waterways” expedition. On a recent departure, Walesa swept guest Ethel Scully off her feet—not just with his insights on history, but also with his deft dance moves. I spoke with her about the experience.
Tell me about your Baltic expedition.
It was wonderful. I like to travel to learn and to grow, and am always looking for enriching experiences. This expedition really did that for me. It took a horizontal slice through history. We spent a lot of time looking at the Hanseatic League, then focused on the fall of the Soviet Union across all the Baltic republics, Poland, and so on. The entire experience was so enriching, not just in terms of the countries we visited, but the other travelers as well.
You met Mikhail Gorbachav and Lech Walesa, both momentous figures in 20th-century history and the unraveling of the Soviet Union. What was that like?
It was tremendously exciting. Here were two Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning men who had tremendous roles in changing the course of history. They were both philosophical.
In the case of Lech Walesa, he spoke of course about his Solidarity movement. It didn’t just mean labor unions, he explained, it meant everyone working together. He spoke of the impact Pope John Paul II had in encouraging the Polish people to stand up for themselves against the Soviets. He spoke of European integration and how it’s working today.
Walesa was thoughtful, and his sense of humor shone through. He seemed warm, down-to-Earth, and engaging. He said he liked to address difficult issues in a light-hearted way. He spoke about not wanting to be the President of Poland after the Soviet Union fell, but feeling that if he didn’t step up, the Poles risked losing so many of the advances that the country had made. And he gave credit to lots of other people. He also spent a lot of his time looking forward and speaking about the future.
Gorbachev also spoke about many things: He spoke of Glasnost and about nuclear disarmament. (He said he was proud of what he’d done to advance that cause.) He spoke about his relationship with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, said his first impression was that Reagan was a dinosaur. As he got to know him better, that assessment changed. Gorbachev said Reagan would ultimately confide to him that his first impression was that Gorbachev was an old-school socialist. Gorbachev said they ultimately grew to have great respect for one another.
Gorbachev also spoke of an environmental organization he founded, Green Cross International. Both Walesa and Gorbachev spoke about the environment being a global issue, something people need to cooperate on a lot more than we currently do. I hadn’t thought so much about the environmental consciousness of Russia, but it’s a priority for him, and he spoke about it.
Someone asked Gorbachev what he would like his epitaph to be. A simple one, he answered: “He tried.” He spoke of how his current health issues are holding him back. I was literally only about 12 feet from the man! I was struck with how warm, real, and down-to-Earth he came across.
Lech Walesa spoke to us aboard ship, in the lounge. He leaned back on the bar and spoke from the heart. I got the impression they were both speaking from the heart. This is what I look for in travel: I want to learn something from the places I see, and want to be enriched by them.
So how did you end up dancing with Walesa?
At the end of his talk, Walesa was gracious and invited people to come up and take photos with him. He’d posed with about a dozen people before I got up with him. I was by myself, just smiling and happy to be there. And instead of a stiff photo, he broke into dance!
The world wants to know: Is Lech Walesa a good dancer?
Oh, yes! He’s a polka aficionado, and he’s quite good.
Did the Baltic expedition change your outlook on the places you visited?
It did, forever. And it made my Christmas Card: “Polka With Peace-Prize-Winning Polish President!”
Over the course of my life, I’ve measured experiences by asking “Is this a National Geographic moment?” I’ve had many figurative National Geographic moments, but this was my first literal National Geographic moment. It was lots of fun, and very memorable. This experience will always stay special for me.
Schedule your brush with history: Explore the Baltic’s Historic Waterways in 2012 with National Geographic Expeditions.
Sven Lindblad and his son Eric with a sea lion in the Galápagos. Photo by Lorenzo Rosenzweig
As pioneers in exploration, National Geographic and Lindblad Expeditions share a passion for adventure, discovery, and conservation. Since 2004, we have partnered to bring travelers to destinations such as the Galápagos, the Arctic and Antarctica, Alaska, Baja, Costa Rica, and more. I spoke with President and Founder Sven-Olof Lindblad about the genesis of Lindblad Expeditions and the common vision that inspired and informs the National Geographic-Lindblad alliance.
Q: You’ve said that you hoped to promote conservation when you established Lindblad Expeditions. How so?
A: When I started this, I wasn’t interested in the travel business, per se. I was a wildlife photographer in Africa. I came back to the United States and I decided to develop this business. My primary interest was trying to make a connection between wild places and people and to have that become a more meaningful relationship.
There is no question that if you marry interesting, important geographies with the ability to conduct meaningful expeditions, then foster dialog about some of the challenges that the world faces, that’s a potent formula. It helps facilitate the development of people’s interests in nature, the environment, and conservation. It’s one of the most effective ways to create meaningful constituents for wildlife and the planet.
A problem with conservation in general is the degree to which it matters in people’s lives in the hierarchy of their priorities. If you have someone who’s been to the Galápagos with their kids or walked on the ice shelves in Antarctica or seen a polar bear in the Arctic, for example, all these subjects become different immediately: They’re not so abstract anymore. If guests have the opportunity to engage with some of the world’s most interesting naturalists, scientists, historians, explorers, and photographers—which they do on the National Geographic-Lindblad fleet—it’s impossible for them to forget these issues.
Q: How do you see the Lindblad-National Geographic partnership within the spectrum of what the Geographic has done throughout our history—helping people to see and understand distant people, places, and wildlife, and inspiring people to care about the planet?
A: Partnerships in general are hard work. What’s been interesting about our partnership over its six years is that, between National Geographic and Lindblad Expeditions we have a combined heritage connected with exploration, discovery, and education that dates back 175 years. The Society has been exposing the world and all that’s in it for nearly 125 years. And for quite awhile we’ve been taking people there.
The combination is wonderful, because we each have distinctive skills and assets that we bring to make our combined efforts way better than if we tried to do this on our own. We have a long heritage of conducting expeditions in remote parts of the world—which is hard work, by the way, for anyone who doesn’t realize it. It’s complicated on a multitude of levels. And National Geographic has all of these extraordinary people, and this heritage of storytelling, of communicating out to the world.
I’ve never seen or heard of a better partnership in my entire business career. People talk to me often about how the partnership is working, and my answer above all else is that there’s total alignment. National Geographic and Lindblad Expeditions form the bottom of the pyramid, and our guests and their experiences are at the top of the pyramid. Any enterprise that focuses primarily, almost religiously, on the experience of the guest has a leg up on most anybody else.
Q: You mention our long, shared legacy of exploration. Vessels in the National Geographic-Lindblad fleet were built in part to serve as platforms for research projects in marine biology. Could you tell me more about the science that guests can witness and sometimes participate in aboard ship?
A: Yes. There’s a certain kind of research that can be done practically from a moving vessel and that makes sense. We’ve joined forces in research work on several occasions. With the Geographic’s Crittercam group looking at sperm whales in the Sea of Cortez, we could efficiently find the whales, and they went out and put cameras on the whales’ backs. (Not an easy job, by the way!)
We also worked with a few scientists who were placing radio tags on the dorsal fins of killer whales in Antarctica to try to understand their migratory patterns. When I was in Antarctica last January, we watched this happen right off the bow of the ship. Then the guests were able to participate in tracking what the killer whales did and where they went. The researchers will be involved with us again this season.
Incidentally, it turns out that what killer whales do is quite remarkable. Many from the Antarctic develop a yellow sheen. They periodically motor up to the Equator, then turn around and come back at enormous speeds. The theory is that they want to get rid of the sheen, because they come back relatively clean.
We’re also working with a researcher in Baja California who’s looking at Humboldt squid. And with photographer Paul Nicklin in the Arctic, this ship became a base camp, dropped him off at various places, and provided him with logistical support so that he could do some complicated photography on and around Svalbard. So there are many occasions where we house scientists and explorers aboard our ships. Any time it can happen, it helps these folks to do their work more effectively, and it’s very engaging for our guests to have them aboard.
To be continued…
See where you can travel with National Geographic and Lindblad.
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