June 09 - Svalbard

 June 09 - Svalbard 

This mornings activity took us to visit a colony of Little Auks, which, according to JEM, are “the cutest bird up here” (I think she might have forgotten about Puffins though!). Nesting in cracks in the rocks there were just thousands of them, about 60,000 according to our resident ornithologist, although I don’t how you’d go about counting them!  It was great to see huge groups of take off from their nests, fly around in a giant circle, and then return to their nests, it was almost like synchronised swimming.  

We’re seeing Reindeer more frequently now than we did earlier on this trip, and we’re also seeing them in larger numbers. I know Reindeer happen to be all over Svalbard but I wonder if the greater numbers are due to the warmer temperature down south? (+2°C instead of -2°C 🥶) I’ll have to find out.  

This afternoon we cruised round to Burgerbukta, an area on the west coast not too far below Longyearbyen, and said to be ‘Spitsbergen in a nutshell’ (Spitsbergen is the main island of Svalbard and is what we’ve been cruising around). Unfortunately it had started to snow, and the visibility wasn’t great, so the planned afternoon activity was changed to a zodiac cruise. 


Out on the water the snow eased off a bit, still wasn’t great though, however we did manage to catch sight of a seal.  The poor thing had obviously had an encounter with a Polar Bear, or something like, as it had had a large chunk taken out of its back and was obviously still recovering. 

While out we did a ‘landing’ on the ice flow (an ‘icing’? 😂). Quite a weird sensation at times, with water half way up your gumboots and the awareness that you’re standing on something that’s moving (which it is!), it’s quite a strange feeling. Added to this was the fact that the piece of ice we were standing on was only about 20m x 20m x 20m x 20m making one a little nervous as well! 😱 😅 



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