Marion Island is remote. One of the two Prince Edward Islands, Marion lies about half-way between South Africa and Antarctica. From Marion Island, it is just under 2000km north to the coast of South Africa and 2300km south to the coast of Antarctica. It is in the middle of the Southern Oceans and at 46 degrees south, is in the heart of the Roaring Forties.
These oceans are the wildest on the planet. Winds and waves circumnavigate the entire globe around Antarctica, unimpeded by major land masses. As such, some of the planet’s strongest winds and largest waves are recorded here. The winds blow consistently from the west, picking up speed as the latitude increases. In the Age of Sail, the winds at different latitudes became famous as the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties and the Screaming Sixties.
The constant westerly winds fuel the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), the world’s largest ocean current, which mixes warm waters descending south from the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans with northward cold water from Antarctica. The convergence of these waters (the Subtropical Convergence Zone or SCZ) brings food from deep within the oceans up to the surface. The SCZ marks the boundary of some of the best seabirding on the planet and this was our destination:
This combination of abundant food, and rare dry land for nesting, makes the Prince Edward Islands a focus for millions of breeding seabirds in the southern hemisphere summer. Visiting such a location is very difficult and landing on the islands is forbidden.
I read about the first “Flock to Marion” trip in 2022. It was an incredible concept, a cruise ship filled with birders, heading out from South Africa and sailing south to Marion Island. The trip provided a rare opportunity to visit this remote part of the globe and to see some of the incredible seabird species that can be found there. Flock to Marion also functioned as a fund-raising opportunity to help the Mouse-free Marion Project, which aimed to eradicate seabird-eating mice from the islands. It also sounded like a completely mad adventure.
Then, in the summer of 2024, it was announced that there would be another trip, to raise further funds. “Flock to Marion Again” was due to depart in late January 2025. This time, I knew I had to be on that ship.
I spread the news that Flock to Marion Again was planned for January 2025, and Andy Last (from Oxford), Ian Reid (from Abu Dhabi) and I booked our places. Beforehand we admitted that we all had a number of concerns. None of us had ever been on a cruise ship before and none of us ever thought that we would. What would birding from a huge cruise ship be like? Would we be so high up that the smaller prions and storm petrels would be invisible? There was also the matter of being in a confined space with nearly 2,000 other birders for seven days. Would this be heaven or would this be hell?
But at the forefront of my mind was seasickness. As someone who barely survived seasickness on the Scillonian III pelagic in 2001, I had given up hope of seeing the southern seabirds. How could I ever sail across the roughest oceans on the planet and survive on deck long enough to see any birds? There was only one solution, a big boat. Or in the immortal words of Chief Brody in Jaws: “We’re going to need a bigger boat!” In fact, a really big boat. Fortunately, Flock to Marion Again had booked the cruise ship MSC Musica:
Weighing in at 92,409 tonnes, I hoped that she would provide a stable base to ward off my seasickness, even in the Roaring Forties. The trip was superbly organised. Beforehand there were online seabird and cetacean identification sessions, hosted by local experts. During the cruise some 60 guides were positioned around the ship’s viewing stations, between 5am and 5pm, to help with seabird identification. A daily lecture schedule was planned, including talks on seabirds from renowned experts Peter Ryan, Peter Harrison and Hadoram Shirihai, as well as lectures on the Mouse-free Marion Project and the conservation work being carried out on the island.
Now committed to the trip, I decided to fully engage with the experience. I attended the online identification sessions, I bought the t-shirt and even went to a penguin fancy dress party, hosted in one of the bars, the evening before we arrived at Marion. A proportion of the cost of cruise automatically went towards the fund-raising efforts.
We boarded the ship in Durban Harbour in the afternoon of Friday 24th January. Up close, the MSC Musica was enormous, towering over the dock infrastructure, a 15-storey high floating hotel. Our cabin was on deck 10, our balcony looking out over the port side. The lowest viewing deck for seeing seabirds was deck 7. Even here it still felt like we were a long, long way above the sea.
Durban harbour provided views of a hunting Peregrine, a flyover Osprey and 4 Pink-backed Pelicans thermalling above the ship. Feeding on the dockside grass were Cape Wagtails and Southern Grey-headed Sparrows. Flocks of Egyptian Geese flew around everywhere, perching on the towers and rooftops of the docks.
At 4:30pm we set sail, full of anticipation and excitement. Great Crested Terns flew past the ship and we saw our first Grey-hooded Gulls. We soon got up to our cruising speed of around 30kph. The ship turned south-east and began heading across the southern Indian Ocean, away from the African continent. An hour from the coast, our first pelagic species appeared, a distant Indian Yellow-nosed Albatross, followed by a Great-winged Petrel. Another hour produced another couple of Great-winged Petrels and 3 Cory’s Shearwater. The seabirds near the South African coast had not quite matched our expectations levels, but it was very early days.
Next: the toughest birding day of our lives in the Tropical Desert!
Just loving this story and I’m itching to know more!!!!