Day 15, 25th March – The jewel of the Beagle Channel
The weather on our last day of the trip mirrored our feelings on beginning our return journey from paradise back to St Andrews. The rain couldn’t dampen our spirits completely though and we excitedly embarked on an hour and a half drive to Estancia Harberton, a marine mammal natural history museum situated to the east of Ushuaia.
News on the marine mammal grapevine was that there had been a pilot whale stranding on the coast, the bodies of which still remained on the shoreline. With Sonja and Lars leading from the front, and with help from our trusty bus driver Roberto, we searched high and low for evidence of the carcasses. New information reached us that there had been up to 50 pilot whales in the small bay, an unknown number of which had stranded. Despite our best efforts, we had no luck locating the whales. All was not lost however, as we managed to add to our almost saturated bird species list with three blackish oystercatchers and a white-throated caracara, along with
our old friends the chimango and the southern caracara.
On arrival at Estancia Harberton, we were welcomed by Lucia and were told the history of the museum. The great grandson of the British founder still resides on the reserve with his American naturalist wife, Natalie Goodall. We were to meet Natalie later, but first were taken around the grounds of the Estancia. The gardens are heavily influenced by her botanist roots but among the primrose bushes and the apple trees, we caught our first glimpse of her marine mammal skeleton collection. A sei whale jaw bone arch lined the garden fence, between the skulls of a bottlenose dolphin and a killer whale.
Lucia led us into the surrounding woodland where we were told about the native species of Tierra del Fuego. This included Lenga, an evergreen beech, historically used by the Yamana and Ona people to make canoes. As in Tierra del Fuego national park, these trees were infested with the Indian bread fungus. After an authentic Argentinian steak lunch, we met Iratxi who showed us the museum’s marine mammal skeletons, collected and prepared by a dedicated team of students working with Natalie Goodall. Natalie began her collection 50 years ago and these days, is struggling for space to house thousands of specimens with vertebrae and flipper bones sticking out of every cupboard. The main exhibition houses a world renowned collection of complete toothed and baleen whale specimens, all collected from the bays around Tierra del Fuego, having been carried great distances by the Antarctic conveyor belt currents.
The most unusual specimens were the collection of beaked whales, some of few complete in the world. The most unknown of all the marine mammals, these whales spend most of their lives at depth and are rarely seen; strandings can therefore provide a wealth of information of these elusive species. Next to the whale skeletons, the museum also houses an extensive pinniped skull collection. We were able to get up close and personal to leopard seals and examine the highly adapted teeth of the filter feeding crabeater seals.
Just as we were getting excited about the prospect of volunteer work at the museum Iratxi led us to the bone shed… Here lay the semi-flensed specimen of a baby pilot whale that had stranded further up the coast. The smaller cetaceans are chopped up and left to soak in freshwater buckets surrounding the bone shed. For the larger animals, the bodies are boiled on outdoor stoves and manually cleaned by the dedicated volunteers – who said marine mammal science was glamorous?
After the smell of the bone shed, a cup of tea was in order. And who better to host our tea party but Natalie Goodall herself. Sitting listening to this accomplished woman was inspirational. She plans to keep growing the collection of marine mammal and seabird specimens as long as she has the space and the dedicated volunteers. As we sipped our tea, we examined a Commersons dolphin skeleton, which sat on the table as a centrepiece. Logbooks and documentation were passed around the table and we got a glimpse of the sheer volume of paperwork involved in the process. Logbooks dated back to day zero not only represented 50 years of research but also thousands of years of marine mammal evolution.
Contact details were exchanged and photos were taken, before piling back into our bus smelling slightly less fresh than the botany Natalie once studied. All this excitement took it out of us and we had sweet dreams of bone sheds and tea parties on the ride back to Ushuaia. On arrival to our fancy hotel, we made our daily visit to the spa with only the imagination of how the original polar explorers first came to the end of the world.
Izzy Langley (MSc MMS)
Hi, very interesting post. I am looking for exactly the same map you posted here depicting animal species of Tierra del Fuego (Natalie’s Tierra del Fuego Flora & Fauna). Could you add some details about it? Thank you!