The Casual Blog

Tag: Chas Glatzer

January 3, 2026

Meeting penguins in the Falkland Islands, reading Trollope, and Trump’s downward trend

Gentoo penguins

In December I made a three-week trip  to the Falkland Islands.  The Falklands are in the Atlantic east of the bottom of South America.  There are two main islands and more than 700 others, of which we spent time on  five:  Saunders, Pebble, Sea Lion, Bleaker, and Carcass, as well as Volunteer Point on East Falkland.  The photos here are from this trip.

My group of six skilled photographers was led by master photographer Chas Glatzer.  Chas has mentored me in the craft for several years now, and he’d made many trips to this remarkable place.  Falkland Islands Holidays assisted with travel and lodging arrangements.  We saw thousands of penguins, as well as sea lions, elephant seals, whales, orca, dolphins, caracaras, black-browed albatrosses, imperial cormorants, giant petrels, upland geese, and many smaller birds.  There were also a lot of sheep.

The penguins were my favorites, and so I’m sharing them here first.  They look very cute, of course, especially when they waddle or hop.  But they have other intriguing qualities.  I liked their curiosity and their sociability.  I admired their bravery as they headed out to hunt in the dark cold sea where orcas and other predators lurk.  I respect their loyalty to their mates and colonies, and their devotion to their chicks. 

We saw penguin groups get organized and waddle down to the beach, then launch themselves into the surf.  Some of them would fish for hours, and others for many days before returning to the colony.  I also was amazed at their athleticism.  Those little birds can jump out of the driving surf onto rocks and climb up and down cliffs. We saw five penguin species:  gentoos, magellanics, southern rockhoppers, macaronis, and kings.  The macaronis were the rarest – I saw only three individuals. 

Macaroni penguin with southern rockhoppers

Most of the penguins had no fear of humans, and some were quite curious about us.  We were able to watch in their large colonies as they incubated eggs and nursed chicks, chased off predatory birds,and cleaned their feathers.  When their mate returned from a fishing expedition, they’d screech with joy and gesture excitedly.  There were friends, and there were rivals.  The birds squealed and pecked at others who violated their space.  They were quite noisy.

We traveled between islands in small planes of the national airline, FIGAS, which adjusted their schedules according to the weather.  It was sometimes rainy, and usually very windy – we did some of our photography in winds of 50 MPH.  Some of the trips involved long and very bumpy off-road rides.  

Although the penguin population of the Falklands numbers in the hundreds of thousands, the human population is about 3,700.  On some of the islands we visited, the permanent residents numbered in the single digits.  We found all our guides and hosts very supportive and friendly. 

I did have one unfriendly bird encounter. Early one morning on Sea Lion Island on the way to the beach to look for orcas I managed to get lost in tall tussock grass. As I worked my way out, I got a blow to the back of the head. It felt like a coconut hit me, but there were no trees. A minute later, it happened again, and I got a glimpse of the attacker: a striated caracara. I figured I might have gotten near its nest, and hastened along, but it hit me again. And again — six times in total. I eventually made it to the beach, where the caracara left off the attack, but there I nearly tripped on a young elephant seal.

Striated caracara

When not in the field and not eating, sleeping, or editing photos, I re-read The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope.  It was a great pleasure!  Published in 1875, the story takes place in London and various English country houses and revolves around a financial scam about shares in a new railroad.  

Magellanic penguins

At the center is a fraudster who manages to insinuate himself into upper-crust society and take gobs of their money, and even gets elected to Parliament.  Trollope refrains from moralizing, but he reflects the importance of values in social and political life.  Some of the story is comic, but the drama of flagrant lying and corruption resonates powerfully with our time.

As we come to the end of year one of the last (I hope!) Trump presidential term, I’ve been reflecting on the educational value of the MAGA experience.  It strikes me that Trump might have unintentionally taught us some valuable lessons.

King penguins

Trump’s value system is hardly unique – it’s deeply embedded in the American psyche – but he is a vivid and extreme example of it.  The core belief is simple:  greed is good.  That is, the point of life is acquisition and domination.  Lies, cruelty, and corruption are acceptable, and even laudable, in the service of gaining ever more money, luxury goods, and fawning followers.  

Because Trump’s dishonesty, greediness, and corruption are so extreme, he makes it easier to see how empty and ultimately unsatisfying this system is.  No matter how many billions he gets, he needs more.  No matter how much flattery he gets, he needs more.  And it’s a moral certainty that further huge additions to his extreme wealth will never make him happy and content.  He’ll want more.  

Many of us are prone to the illusion that more wealth and power would make us happier.  But most of us aren’t completely selfish and amoral, and our dreams of wealth are tempered with other values.  We value family and community.  We value justice and fairness.  We value honesty and integrity.  We try to treat others with respect and compassion.  

I probably don’t need to prove that these values are good ones, since we already generally teach them to our children, and all societies have always had them to some degree.  But Trump and MAGA are proof positive that lacking them is a huge problem.  Running a government suffused with corruption and cruelty is a recipe for disaster.

Almost daily, we get reports of more governmental incompetence.  As the MAGA leaders have fired experts and experienced bureaucrats, the normal business of government is becoming more and more confused and error prone.  Whether it’s sending out Social Security checks, collecting taxes, or investigating serious crime, we count on the federal government to take its job seriously and get things right.  

Our federal justice system is a shambles, and our health department is assuring more death from preventable diseases.  The economy works well only for the well-off; for everyone else, affordability is a problem.  Trump and his minions are not only morally bankrupt – they’re failures at just taking care of business.  

Today we learned that Trump ordered US forces to invade Venezuela and abduct its President.  This drama has just started unfolding, but one thing we know already:  it’s a clear violation of US and international law.  Like other lawless invasions by the US and other countries around the world, it will probably result in a lot of misery and death.  

The justifications for this, as stated by Trump, keep changing.  First it was a continuation of the absurd and never ending war on drugs, no longer in metaphorical terms.  Then it was about seizing the oil resources of the country.  It’s impossible to take seriously Trump’s claim that these resources are rightfully ours.  This is about as raw as criminality by a sovereign state can get.  

One other thing that is a virtual certainty:  this war may be popular with oil industry executives, but if it goes forward almost everyone else is going to oppose it.  Even the MAGA base will not be keen on sending American kids to die to enrich the oil industry.  It may be that this will further erode Trump’s waning popularity, and hasten the end of the MAGA regime.  We can hope. 

November 28, 2023

Encountering polar bears

In the first half of November I went to northern Manitoba to see some Arctic creatures, including especially polar bears.  It was a huge thrill to spend some time with these amazing animals.  I’m still sorting through the thousands of photographs I took, but the ones here are some of my favorites so far.  

Polar bears are Earth’s largest land-based carnivores.  An average adult weighs around a thousand pounds and stands about eight feet tall.  There aren’t a lot of them left in the world – about 25,000.  About two-thirds of these are in Canada, and the southern Hudson Bay population that I visited is Canada’s largest.  

Polar bears’ primary food is seals, which they capture on the ice.  When I was there, the bears were waiting for the Hudson Bay to freeze, which was a bit behind schedule, with warmer temperatures than normal.  The bears hadn’t eaten a substantial meal for some months, but most of them looked healthy. 

Although the bears are usually solitary, we saw a few pairs of them playing and sparring. They paused and seemed to think carefully when they encountered us.  Of course, they can be very dangerous, though the ones we saw usually seemed curious, rather than threatening.  

Of course, it’s hard to be sure; maybe they want us to think that.  There’s a lot about them that we don’t know, since they spend most of their lives in a harsh environment far from humans.  We do know they are very strong, and very stealthy.  They are well insulated against the arctic cold, and good swimmers.  Their sense of smell is orders of magnitude better than ours, and they use it to detect prey from great distances.  They are superbly adapted for their environment.

Global warming is particularly bad news for polar bears, whose seal-hunting livelihood depends on cold and ice.  I was glad to hear that the southern Hudson Bay population is holding steady for now, though elsewhere the bears are seriously threatened by warming and habitat loss.  These unique creatures are another good reason we need to get more serious about getting off fossil fuels and mitigating climate change.  

The southern Hudson Bay is also home to other iconic creatures, including wolves.  These usually keep well clear of humans, but we were privileged to have a couple of close encounters.  We also saw an Arctic fox in Churchill.

The trip was organized and led by Chas Glatzer, a master wildlife photographer and gifted teacher.  We stayed at two lodges on the Hudson Bay that we reached by small plane from Churchill – Seal River and Nanuk – run by Churchill Wild.  Both lodges were comfy and served delicious food, including options for the plant-based eaters like me.  

Our guides at Seal River were Jess, Boomer, and Marco, and at Nanuk we had Michael, Emri, and Adam.  All of them were experienced, and had amazing talents, like spotting a polar bear asleep on the ice half a mile away and talking with them.  

At Seal River the guides explained the safety procedures for walking in bear territory, which included staying close together so as to present ourselves as a bigger creature.  When bears approached us too closely, the guides would speak firmly to them, and usually quickly persuaded them to turn around.  

A couple of times they had to escalate by throwing a rock, which got the bears headed the other way.  If the rocks hadn’t worked, they had louder noises to make, including a starter pistol.  If all else failed, they had shotguns, though happily none of them had ever had to shoot a bear.

Throughout our stay, bears frequently came right up to the fence around the lodges.  The guides spoke firmly to discourage them from chewing on the fence wire.  They also spoke firmly to us about not standing right next to the fence when we had bear visitors.  

I’d looked forward to seeing the northern lights for the first time.  It was cloudy most nights, but we did have a couple of mostly clear nights, and I got to see what they were about.  They were not strong enough to excite the locals, but I was still happy.  

My main anxiety ahead of the trip was the possibility of frostbite, since I need good nerves in my fingers for piano playing.  Churchill Wild furnished me with a very warm parka, insulated pants, and boots, and my own Heat gloves-inside-mittons combo, with a chemical hand warmer, worked well.  On windy days, I wore a balaclava mask and ski goggles to protect my face.  

I also dreaded the commercial flights, though they mostly went smoothly.  (The low flying small-plane segments were fun.) The only serious glitch was on our flight out of Churchill, which, after loading us up, had an equipment problem, and had to unload us.  We had to stay an extra night in Churchill and get new plane tickets.  

I booked my new flight with Delta, which had only one possibility for me – Winnipeg to Atlanta, and Atlanta to Raleigh.  The connection in Atlanta was 46 minutes, which I expected would be impossible to make in that large airport.  We arrived 20 minutes behind schedule, in Terminal A, and my Raleigh flight was boarding in far off Terminal D.  

I rushed down Terminal D to the train, and up the length of A as fast as I could, but the gate for the Raleigh flight had closed when I got there.  I could see that the plane had not departed, but things did not look good. I knew the usual rule was, once the gate closes, it doesn’t open again.  

This time, though, the gate agent, observing it was the holiday season, opened this one up and sent me aboard.  A flight attendant, seeing my heavy camera backpack, suggested I put it in an open overhead bin in first class!   As I prepared to wedge in a center seat in row 32, another flight attendant said she had an open aisle seat I was welcome to!  Wow!  Thanks a lot to that kind and helpful Delta crew.