Birders are strange and talkative.

Sea sickness looks downright miserable. Despite pleasant weather, many on board struggled or simply failed to hold their stomachs. Thankfully, the ship was filled with thoughtful gestures including never being more than 5 feet away from vomit bag stashes at any given time. Personally, I wanted an unforgiving Drake Passage – after all, this was supposed to be an homage to Shackleton – but given the smell and anguish that would have brought on from those already being physically tormented, it’s probably best we had fairly steady water for our first two days at sea crossing the Drake.

It wasn’t long before I and likely the rest of the ship met Stephan, one of the chattiest individuals on the face of this planet. He would become one of the most well known people on the ship given his endless enthusiasm for striking up a conversation with anyone – especially if they show the slightest interest in birds. Thus began a dark descent into the world of birding that I had been narrowly avoiding until this point.

To be clear, I do not dislike birds. Flying is a wonderful expression of freedom – to capture wind and ride it across vast distances is a romantic concept. However, both the birds themselves and their owners are unsettling to me. Starting with bird owners – they capture freedom with clipped wings to trap living beings in their homes for forced companionship. This seems like a selfish and perverse practice. Meanwhile birds in their own right are terrifying. After many years working at an animal hospital, the only animal that truly frightened me to my core was an extremely confident chicken. It was impossible to predict its next move and I truly believe it was willing to kamikaze so long as it could cause as much bodily harm to humans as possible on its way out. For what its worth, I will acknowledge that both a turkey and a crow have won me over despite my reservations and proved birds are capable of kindness – though I would still recommend caution with them.

In any case, I now have both the eBird and Merlin apps and am enjoying the Pokemon-like gamification attached to birding to see how many birds can be spotted.

Days at sea were otherwise uneventful and mostly consisted of lectures (including on birds from John, the onboard ornithologist) and a brief flurry of excitement on the ship upon seeing our first humpback whale.

I like to wonder if that particular humpback, confident with its newfound popularity, called on its pod to witness how an entire ship would cheer whenever he practiced a blow and he would brag that humans found him very cool. Only to find that when he returned later with his incredulous pod, the ship had grown so accustomed to humpbacks that they were almost unremarkable to us and our threshold for being impressed was significantly higher. He would swear up and down that we really were enthusiastically supportive and amazed by him, while the pod would see us notice them from the dining hall windows, nod and acknowledge their existence only to ponder the ice cream options of the day. For what it’s worth, I will attest to the pod that that particular humpback was in fact very popular to our ship and made several impressive breaches. While I can’t speak for all of the humpbacks claims, he is an honest whale in this particular case.

In reference to Jan 13 – 14 2026