Hawk lies to her anchor in Husvik Harbour, the southernmost of the three westward-pointing fingers of Stromness Bay, rolling very gently to the slight swell working its way in from the sea. A mile over her bow, a dozen icebergs the size of houses have grounded at the entrance to the harbor in 200 feet of water, a fairy castle labyrinth of fluted turrets and crenellated towers carved in white and blue ice. A few bergy bits and growlers float around us, each a startling topaz blue color against the milky silver blue of the water. A huge kelp patch a hundred feet wide and a half mile long lies about three hundred feet in front of us; it damps the swell and traps most of the small ice before it can reach us. Even from down below, I can hear a chorus of noises that makes it sound as if we are anchored inside of a zoo: the sharp barks of small puppies, the nasal grunting of large pigs, the deep roar of a lion, the trumpeting of an elephant, and dozens of other sounds that most resemble the rudest noises human bodies produce, amplified ten fold. This cacophony comes from three colonies of about 200 elephant seals spread across the beach behind us.

We arrived at South Georgia Island two weeks ago today after a five-day passage from the Falklands. A hundred miles long and anywhere from three to thirty miles wide, the island runs from northeast to southwest in an elongated comma about 200 miles south of the Antarctic convergence, in the polar sea. Our average water temperature since crossing the convergence has been just above freezing; air temperatures have ranged from 28=B0 to 55=B0F but have averaged in the high 30s. This morning we woke to a light dusting of snow on the decks and the mountains surrounding the harbor. The low pressure systems that scoot under the tail end of South America and bounce up into the Atlantic bring a steady stream of gale- to storm-force winds, westerly if the lows stay to the south of the island and easterly if they rebound to the north. Mountainous and windswept, with no trees or bushes of any kind, the island consists of 100 miles of mountain peaks floating above a sea of glacier ice. The spine of mountains that runs down the middle of the island start at 2,500 feet near the western tip and rises as it runs east, culminating in 9,625-foot high Mt. Paget at the point where the eastern end of the island droops to the south. Huge glaciers wind in blue and white rivers down from these mountain peaks, four or five into each long fjord. The biggest of these, the Nordenskjold glacier, drops to the water in a face that's three miles wide and more than a hundred feet high. But where the mountains meet the sea, the island offers a unique habitat in Antarctic waters - dozens of deep fjords, some of which almost bisect the island, create hundreds of miles of shingle beaches backed by rugged ridges and headlands covered with tussock grass. The island's orientation lengthwise across the current called the Cape Horn drift causes deep ocean upwellings and eddies of the krill and squid that feed most of the Antarctic bird and mammal species. For those animals that cannot breed on the ice shelves of Antarctica, this island offers the largest breeding ground in the sub-Antarctic complete with abundant food just a short swim or flight away. Millions of south polar birds and animals congregate on its shores every year to form some of the biggest breeding colonies of their kind to be found anywhere in the world. Four species of penguins and four of albatrosses breed here, as do a hundred thousand elephant seals, millions of fur seals and dozens of species of the smaller petrels. With very few exceptions, these animals are almost fearless, allowing people to approach within a few yards.

The island would be an icy Eden, a frozen Disneyland, except for the brutal reality of nature. We feel as if we are on sensory overload, all but overwhelmed by the weight of all the wildlife. And it's not just the physical presence of the animals, as wonderful as that is. Rather what really gets to us is the rawness and urgency of nature, its utter indifference to the individual, the "red in tooth and claw" reality that we humans so neatly manage to evade most of the time. Here we see nature not as a watered down documentary, but as it really is, as it really works - all its cruelty and all its cruel beauty; all its urgency and all its urgent necessities. Nature is not pretty or domesticated here. It is demanding, relentless, unsparing, and utterly pitiless. It is the crucible that forged us as a species, and the savagery we could revert to if the buffering influences of civilization are ever ripped away by some great calamity.

Cruising here combines freezing temperatures and frequent gale-force winds with other challenges unique to the island. The high mountains and numerous glaciers create dozens of microclimates so that fine, sunny, warm weather in one harbor turns into foggy, chill, windy weather in another just a few miles away. Katabatic winds, winds accelerated by the temperature differentials between the high mountains and the warmer valleys at sea level, can reach 50 knots when the gradient winds may only be 15-20 knots. In a gale, those katabatic winds can and do reach 100 knots. Unlike in Chile, there are no small coves surrounded by trees to signal a place safe from these winds. The treeless shoreline and the glacier-scoured fjords afford only a few really good, all-weather anchorages, so we must always keep track of the weather and be ready to move if it shows signs of changing. Kelp grows as thickly here as anywhere we have been, necessitating a great deal of work with a kelp knife to clear the chain and anchor as it is raised. The ice offers another set of challenges. At this time of year, almost all of it is broken up pack ice from Antarctica, being slowly reduced to smaller and smaller pieces by the warm air temperatures, the endless erosion from waves and the action of gale-force winds. While the big bergs are easy enough to see and navigate around, the car-sized, water-colored growlers consist of the rock-hard, freshwater heart of the melting icebergs, and these float just at or below water level making them all but impossible to see in large waves until the boat is right upon them. Getting the anchor up and navigating safely to a new anchorage in the dark is something to be done only in the gravest of emergencies. After two weeks, we are starting to adjust to these challenges. But this is a place where we can never totally let down our guard.

We are just starting to appreciate what a gift time is in this place, for time means that we get to see not a single snapshot of the wildlife at one point in their reproductive cycle, but a feature length film that covers a significant part of each species' lifecycle. In the short summer, each species goes through molting, courtship, breeding and birth, not necessarily in that order. Right now, the elephant seals have had their pups and the females will soon be heading off to sea to feed; the first fur seals have just started to arrive on the beaches and will not be giving birth for several more weeks; the gentoo penguins are establishing their rookeries and will soon be laying; the king penguins are molting and will not start courtship and breeding for another month; the Wandering albatrosses that will breed this year have not yet arrived though some adults are still feeding last year's chicks; the smaller albatrosses are now laying and they will be incubating their eggs through the end of December. To visit one or two days, as those who come on cruise ships do, means seeing one freeze frame of this process for each species. To be able to spend a month or more allows us to witness a significant part of each lifecycle and to better understand how each fits together.

In addition, spending time here means getting a chance to watch some of the dedicated researchers at work among the colonies of animals and getting to know some of the people who live here year round and have come to know it in all its moods and seasons. We feel privileged indeed to be here, despite the challenges. And we'll be sharing some of what it means to experience the wildlife firsthand through additional posts over the next few weeks.