ZECO TRAVEL TALK

With the safe return of Le Ponant’s crew confirmed, we received a note from the ship owners that we’d like to share with you.

Dear Scott and all our friends at Zegrahm,

Thank you so much for your email. It is indeed a great relief to get our crew members back home. They are back in Paris tonight.

The ship is also in a good state, and we should start our cruises back to normal, in the coming weeks. Once again, thank-you very much for your continuous support during the past week.
It was sincerely very much appreciated by all of us at CIP and we are looking to share such a warm support with our crew members in the coming days.

Very kind regards on behalf of all your friends at CIP.

Eric LUSTMAN
COMPAGNIE DES ILES DU PONANT

We are extremely happy to report that the news this morning from France is that the crew of the Le Ponant has been released. “PARIS, April 11 (Reuters) -The 30-strong crew of a luxury French yacht have been freed without incident a week after pirates took them hostage off Somalia, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office said in a statement on Friday.” Read the rest of the article here. We hope to only hear more good news of their return and will update you with any more information we receive in the next few days. Again, please check your reliable news source for more information as developments may happen rapidly today.

On Friday April 4th the French sailing vessel Le Ponant was seized by pirates off the coast of Somalia. Zegrahm Expeditions has chartered this exceptional ship for many years and thus has a close relationship with the ship owner and dedicated crew. We support them in this troubling time and send our thoughts and prayers to all the crew and their families. See in comments below a letter sent on April 7th to the ship owner.

This web site has a good compilation of the daily developments, or for the latest news and updates, please check with your reliable news source. As of Monday April 7th the crew is believed to be safe and unharmed and the French government is in negotiations with the pirates. There were no passengers on board at the time of the seizure.

Zegrahm cofounder and seabird expert, Peter Harrison, is working on his next book Seabirds: A Handbook. Peter has written and illustrated over a dozen books, of which Seabirds: An Identification Guide is considered the bible of seabird identification. Peter has shared with us several pages from his manuscript in progress. Below are links to detailed pages on the emperor penguin and the three newly designated species of rockhopper penguin (see Peter’s previous blog post on this subject).

Rockhopper Penguin PDF
Eastern Rockhopper Penguin PDF
Northern Rockhopper Penguin PDF
Emperor Penguin PDF

In a Seattle Times story—August 17, 2007—writer Craig Welch reported a fascinating sequence of events that spans 7,000 miles and two hemisphere, a sooty shearwater chick, a fish, and an electronic monitoring device… and the research scientist who was the catalyst for the story. We thought you’d enjoy a brief recap of a mystery with an amazing answer:

When Dale Whaitiri, a bird researcher, pulled a tiny monitoring tag from a dead baby sooty shearwater on an island off Southern New Zealand, he wanted to know where it came from and how it got there. That bird was about to be the dinner of local Maori tribesmen who “catch the delicious chicks for supper, but hand over the stomachs to Whaitiri and other researchers who monitor the birds’ diets.”

Some scientific sleuthing revealed that the tag was three years old and originated in a steelhead that was being monitored after it was released into Columbia River. Since steelhead migrate north, it was determined that a sooty shearwater must have been the carrier. These hardy seabirds fly thousands of miles to nest in warm weather and they are often seen in great numbers at the mouth of the Columbia feeding on steelhead as they make their way into the Pacific. The birds favor nesting spots in Japan and New Zealand and lay eggs in underground burrows.

Welsh reports that Jen Zamon, a seabird expert for the Northwest Fisheries Science Center feels the answer to the mystery then “…may be elementary. A sooty shearwater ate the steelhead on the Columbia, carried the indigestible glass tag in its belly for two years, then regurgitated it into the baby’s eager maw.”

The greater mystery, according to Welsh, ends up being: “How did the tag wind up in a fat, flightless bird about to be eaten by Maori tribesmen? And of the millions of …sooty shearwaters—called “titi” by the Maoris—how did Whaitiri manage to poke this one’s belly?”

“The odds are almost impossible to fathom,” said Zamon.

To read the story in its entirety: seattletimes.com

As part of the New England Aquarium Lecture series, Jack Grove, Zegrahm Cofounder and marine expert, will present Galapagos: A Laboratory for Global Marine Conservation on October 9, 2007 at the Harborside Learning Lab of the New England Aquarium in Boston. Marine ecosystems around the globe are currently threatened by an array of forces. Jack has spent 25 years visiting, studying, and photographing some of the world’s most breathtaking seascapes. Using a number of these ecosystems as background, he will share the unusual beauty and conservation challenges of the Galapagos and discuss the conservation and management programs in effect there, which may provide answers for other fragile island ecosystems. For more information about the lecture, go to www.neaq.org/lowellprograms.

Our clients are a loyal and tight group. They are also our friends. New travelers come on our expeditions meet these travelers, get to know them, and then become one of them… We at Zegrahm & Eco Expeditions are very, very lucky and we know it.

For several years we have been considering different ways to create a space where our travelers could communicate with each other—after an expedition. To protect your privacy while on our trips we don’t give out contact lists. This means you are frantically going around on the last few days of your trip collecting e-mails and addresses of these new found friends. We hope Zegrahm Travel Talk will be a community space where our travelers can find each other again—and be a place to share those perfect photos you took of that penguin on the beach… you and your new friends at sunset on the top deck… You promised to share those photos and now we hope we’ve made that easier for you. Read more