Poll - Your favourite Antarctic animal

[Paul]

Or "charismatic megafauna" to coin a phrase.

[Keith]

Your categories are too broad - fancy lumping a stroppy Adelie in with a cuddly Chinstrap and a regal Emperor. And the seals too - if they were split up, I can't see the Leopard getting many votes. Anyway, with the categories as given, I suppose I'll go with the penguins.

[Anonymous]

baby penguins are so cute!!!

[floating_doc]

Where are sheathbills in all this?!

Spent last season at Port Lockroy studying gentoo penguins amongst other things, they were pretty boring but I could watch the sheathbills for hours!!!

Sue

[Paul]

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.

[floating_doc]

The gentoos could be pretty entertaining at times, especially during feeding chases (where the juvenile chicks chase their parent) and learning to swim, but the sheathbills had a lot more character.

Some of the things they entertained us with included pooing on the heads of both my colleagues at Lockroy (and sparing me - I think they knew they had an ally!), knowing EXACTLY when a penguin was going to pass a ball of regurgitated food to its chick and flying at the pair to make the penguin drop the food, running off with or pecking anything we put down for a minute, and lots more besides. Although mutts constantly running up and down on the roof of the hut did keep us awake sometimes!

And our Lockroy sheathbills also had chicks - who could fail to like a bird whose chicks run up to you and start pecking at your boots whenever you venture near them?!

Of course a lot of tourists thought they were "pigeons"...

Sue

(PS. As sheathbills don't feature in the survey, I've given the seals a vote - fur seals are a pain on land but glorious underwater, Weddells sing beautifully, and ellies are just so laid back! Most of the time...)

[Pirates Armada]

bet ya never seen this rare breed of billy goat in the arctic.

http://urbanlegends.about.com/librar...ne_fishing.htm

[Lilith]

I wouldn't be surprised if that pic was real! :razz: anyway everyone knows i'm a penguin nut, but my favs are Adelies, but this little guy is really cute too...
http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/5518/cutie8nt.png

[Pirates Armada]

these guys are getting filthy rich from being arctic monkeys...

http://kevxml2adsl.verizon.net/_1_2P...top=1&ran=9478

[Maria.]

Emperor Penguins (I am mad about them) and also the Albatross.