South Georgia. Back from the brink?

Impeding my way recently to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s grave in Grytviken is an elephant seal spreadeagled on the tussock grass. It must be at least half a tonne in weight. As I passed carefully, the blubbery male strained its head and opened its mouth in displeasure, huffing slightly before flopping to the ground like a deflating bouncy castle. 

Earlier in 2024, with High Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) declared in South Georgia, the walk to Shackleton’s grave had been off-limits to cruise ship visitors because the virus was impacting the elephant seals that usually loiter nearby. However, a year after the outbreak’s arrival, South Georgia seems to have escaped the apocalypse that some like myself feared. There have been an indeterminate number of animal deaths, yet most sites are fully open again for this year’s Austral summer visitor season from November to March.

South Georgia is a UK Overseas Territory roughly 1500 kilometres southeast of the Falklands in the South Atlantic. Around 100 expedition ships visit this subantarctic outpost each year. It’s a special place. A snow-capped mountainous island often described as the world’s only recovering ecosystem. Ever since whaling ended on the island around the mid-1960s and a well-policed marine protection zone was established, staggeringly large populations of seals, penguins, and seabirds have amassed. When HPAI was confirmed, there were concerns it could spread like wildfire through densely packed colonies such as St Andrews and Salisbury Plain, which both possess hundreds of thousands of breeding king penguins.

HPAI was thought to have arrived around October 2023 on Bird Island, an albatross breeding colony off South Georgia’s coast, with the vector most likely migrating brown skuas from South America. In its early detection, skuas, kelp gulls, and Antarctic terns were found infected, and by early January, HPAI had transmitted to elephant and fur seals.