Sheathbills (also known as "mutts") can be entertaining, in the winter, they used to land on the jetty and only put one leg down so as not to get too cold, sometimes the one leg went through the gaps in the slats as they did a spectacular crash landing.
In fact they wouldn't even put the other leg down if they were in your way and trying to get out, just increasing the hop rate instead. For quite a while I was convinced we had a one-legged mutt living around the base.
We even started to wonder if the Antarctic may have become an evolution-free zone when looking at the daft things some of the wildlife did.
But how could you consider mutts a favourite animal? I used to love the gentoos when the youngsters went down to the sea for the first time and started to paddle.
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