South Polar Skua

You'll most often spot the south polar skua patrolling above ship wakes and cruising low over beaches in the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland Islands during the austral summer sailing season, roughly November through March. Further south, it turns up around the Ross Sea's ice edges as well, a reminder of how far this bird ranges across the continent's coastal waters.

It's a large seabird, one of the bulkier members of the skua family, Stercorariidae, and taxonomists have at times lumped it with the great skua and other big skuas in a separate genus, Catharacta, reflecting how closely related these tough, wide-ranging birds are. The older name for the species, MacCormick's skua, honours Robert McCormick, the explorer and naval surgeon who first collected the type specimen, a small footnote of expedition history that's easy to appreciate once you're watching the bird itself work a shoreline in the Antarctic Sound.