Penguins, Foxes and Whales

I have been thinking about the South Atlantic, maybe because it is the time of year when Aimo would be going South.  This year he won't be, unless he has a short trip to the Falklands.  So I've been thinking about whales and ambergris.  What's ambergris?  Look it up, it's very interesting.  Aimo has never brought me any ambergris back from the South Atlantic, but there's time yet.

So I was thinking about whales and I found out about the Falklands Islands Wolf.  In 1876 at Shallow Bay (I love factual place-names) in the Falkland Islands, the last Falklands Wolf was killed.  Charles Darwin himself had predicted it would go the way of the dodo.  Which it did, but has not become as famous, which isn't fair really.

The first recorded sighting of the animal was made in 1690 by the crew of a British ship, the Welfare.  The animal was stocky, russet-coloured and about the size of a Labrador.  It had a thick woolly coat and a white-tipped, brush-like tail.  So was it a wolf or a fox?  In most respects it resembled a large, muscular fox, albeit one that ate penguins, geese and seals.

How cool is that?  It deserves to be as famous as the dodo for sure.  Unfortunately I don't have a picture of a Falklands Islands Wolf-Fox, but Aimo has lots of photos of penguins, so here are some Falklands Islands penguins, on the beach, on the dunes, hanging out...

A Man in a Penguin Suit

A Penguin on a Beach

A Penguin on Holiday

Penguins on a Windy Beach

Two Penguins

One Penguin

Penguins Dancing on a Beach by Jack Vettriano

Darwin stated the mystery of the Falklands Islands Wolf(Fox): "As far as I am aware there is no other instance in any part of the world, of so small a mass of broken land, distant from a continent, possessing so large a quadruped peculiar to itself".  Various theories have tried to explain this evolutionary mystery.  Some have suggested that the wolf-fox was descended from the domesticated culpeos, a South American fox which the Yaghan people of Tierra del Fuego used for hunting.  I'm not going to bother to describe the other theories, they are much more boring than that.  Hunting with foxes, I like it.