A couple of weeks ago, I went with a group to Whale Point – which is a noted wildlife spot on East Falkland. You need to ask the farm’s permission before you go and we were lucky to be given it, as lambing was well underway and the sheep are pretty wild and easily disturbed by cars and young lambs are very stupid… more on this later.

We took two cars as we were going to be “camp driving” this means off road driving on “tracks”, so you need serious off road cars and you go into twos. Two, so that one can pull the other out if its gets stuck. We drove for about 45 minutes out of Stanley (on the tarmac road) towards Mount Pleasant Camp and just past the turning to Fitzroy we turned off the road to start across the farmland. There were vehicle tracks, but you need a good sense of direction and a map if possible to keep going to the sea (maps are hard to get, there are few printed and these are mainly held by the military).

After a lot of bumping and a spectacularly steep slope down to a river, we made the right choices and arrived at the first beach. This is called Whale Point because there were a lot of whale skeletons there, possibly from a mass stranding in the past. Over time they’ve gradually weathered and disappeared but we did see some.

The other attraction here is a Gentoo penguin colony – which has a nesting site about a 1km from the beach. The Gentoos trot backwards and forwards to the colony, always looking in a hurry, as they lean forward, with their wings outstretched and scurrying along. At the colony they were nest building and getting ready to lay eggs. We were able to quietly get very close and watch as they squabbled about territory, stole each others nest material and had a rest before the hard work of parenthood begins.

We went back to the cars and did some more bouncy driving towards a bay in which there is a shipwreck. At this point we did start to see a lot of ewes with young lambs. When the sheep see the cars they tend to move off quite quickly and their lambs do not always go with them and sometimes become separated. We had been warned about this and the drill in this situation was, stay in the car and turn the engine off and wait. If you stay in the car, but leave the engine on, the lamb can’t hear the mother calling. If you get out the lamb may come to you, but the mother won’t and then they can become permanently separated. So you sit still, turn the engine off and wait – we had been told it could take up to 30 minutes.

Both cars had to stop a couple of times and then just as we could see the wreck in the distance we had an impasse. A ewe had a very, very young lamb (an hour old? less?) and it was lying near the track. She tried to get it to move but although it could just about walk, it definitely couldn’t manage to follow her across the tussocky terrain. After about 20 minutes of waiting we decided that the answer was to reverse up the track and do a multi-point turn, fortunately without getting stuck, and go back to the beach and find a spot where we could get out of the wind for lunch.

Our last stop of the day was to go and see the Elephant seals and their new pups, on another beach where they like to haul out, give birth and mate. Elephant seals are the largest seals in the world and like all seals they have lovely eyes, but they are very large and the males are massive and when they fight are really something to see. However, today all was peace and tranquillity.

After we’d watched the seals, we we retraced our bumpy tracks back to the road and made our way home.