The Scotia Arc is basically the connecting tissue between South America and Antarctica. A long underwater system, it has a number of islands appearing on the surface. South of Tierra del Fuego, most of them have never had native populations. This is the frosty part of the Southern Hemisphere, and what happens there is mostly out of our sight.
The Snowy Sheathbill lives there. It's the kind of cold weather bird you don't see much in these parts. The white fluffy feathers could almost pass for packed snow. Did kids build it? But you have to admit it also looks quite determined.
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I'm not sure how you discovered references to the Scotia Arc but it is pretty interesting. I don't imagine too many novels have been written about that part of the world but at the risk of being boring it's a subject Patrick O'Brian treated in several of his books. In one memorable book Aubrey took his ship around Cape Horn - a passage that was itself extremely hazardous. (From the 15th-century to the 20th, an estimated 10,000 seamen were lost in shipwrecks caused by gale force winds, freezing equipment and huge icebergs). The Scotia Arc likely wasn't known about in Napoleonic times but O'Brian's descriptions of the conditions was very detailed - the unpredictable currents likely had a lot to do with the underlying topography.
And of course, Maturin, the ship's doctor and amateur Naturalist (weren't they all?) kept records, painted images and dried samples of the unknown creatures they found - including the Snowy Sheathbill. I agree it is pretty and does have a determined look about it.
For a while I've had this interest in how another sapient species (i.e. our niche) might develop around the time of Dougal Dixon's After Man, which is set 50 million years after our extinction. There's been some tectonic movement and several continents have fused into a supercontinent. Anyway, my feeling was that Antarctica would have moved far enough north so that the edges of it would at least support a traditional Inuit-style lifestyle. The Scotia Arc gets close to Antarctica so I researched it as well. Those islands would be more in the temperate zone, although still quite cool.
Anyway, yes, there was a big overlap between ship's doctors and the amateur naturalists who really had a large part in revolutionizing our understanding of the world. Good old Charles D. was just one high-profile example. And I've resolved to start reading one of the Aubrey & Maturin books in the next few weeks.
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