Nightingale and Inaccessible Islands, Tristan da Cunha Group
After a quiet night at anchor just off the island of Tristan da Cunha, we picked up several local people from the Settlement early in the morning and sailed with them out to Nightingale Island. This small, dramatic, and beautiful volcanic structure is noted worldwide for its very interesting natural history. Nightingale Island is only 27 miles from Tristan da Cunha, so it didn’t take us long to reach it. Conditions were favorable for a landing, and we gave people the options of hikes ashore or Zodiac cruises along the island’s edge. The hikers followed a steep trail through tussock grass (a different species, but reminiscent of the tussock grass we encountered in the Falklands and South Georgia) in order to see the incredible wildlife. All along the trail, we passed fledgling and juvenal yellow-nosed albatrosses impatiently waiting to learn to fly and join their parents out at sea, which we have so greatly enjoyed watching from the decks of our ship in the South Atlantic. Some of us hiked all the way up to the top of the island to enter the eerie and somewhat spooky forest of little Phylica trees, all of which are coated with Usnea lichens. The forest floor is covered with thick growths of ferns, and many albatrosses were nesting on the ground among the trees. In addition, the island is filled with the burrows of great shearwaters and broad-billed prions, and we saw their skua-devoured carcasses everywhere along the trail. Nightingale Island is uninhabited, but several huts remain from the days when Tristanians came here to harvest the eggs and young of great shearwaters (which nest here by the millions) and the Mosleyi subspecies of the rockhopper penguin (known locally as pinamin), which is noted for its wild yellow crest (Figure A).
After everyone was ashore who was going ashore, we moved the pick-up site to a nearby rocky shoreline closer to the huts, and everyone got to see a large massed group of molting rockhoppers on the sloping expanse of a smooth rocky outcrop below the huts. A cargo ship named MS Oliva wrecked near our landing site a year ago, almost to the day, and spilled both its cargo of soybeans and its entire storage of fuel bunker. National Geographic Explorer came on the scene right after the wreck, and we witnessed the environmental disaster firsthand. Fortunately, today there is no obvious sign remaining from that devastating oil spill, or the wrecked ship, which so adversely affected the little rockhopper penguins then.
There is another island in the Tristan da Cunha group known as Inaccessible Island. It has been a protected nature reserve since 1994, and together with Gough Island (a World Heritage Site), accounts for 40% of the land area within the Tristan da Cunha Group now under environmental protection. The name ‘Inaccessible’ comes from the fact that volcanic cliffs rise vertically to 1,000 feet (300 meters) along nearly the entire circumference of the island, although there are a couple possible landing sites. The weather held for us this afternoon, and the island became accessible to us. It is home to thousands of pairs of sooty albatrosses, many of which we saw flying in tandem overhead, along with lots of Subantarctic fur seals and the northern-most population of wandering albatrosses. But, foremost among its amazing bird fauna must certainly be the Inaccessible Island flightless rail, the world’s smallest flightless bird, as well as one of the world’s rarest species of birds. Incredibly, sharp-eyed Robin Repetto, one of our accompanying local guides from Tristan, found one for us. Many of us even managed to get photographs of this incredibly elusive tiny bird (Figure B).
We returned to Tristan da Cunha in the early evening and repatriated most of our Tristanian guides and guests just before the harbor was closed at dusk (a few of them stayed aboard to travel with us to Cape Town). Drinks were served on the aft deck this evening so we could enjoy a spectacular sunset as we sailed away from Tristan da Cunha. This was followed by a delectable dinner of fresh Tristanian lobster.
