Bleaker Island

Bleaker Island is long, narrow and almost flat, which for once makes a Falklands island easy to walk: gentoo, magellanic and rockhopper colonies, an imperial shag colony and a pond with waterfowl all sit within a few kilometres of the settlement on foot. The name comes from a corruption of Breaker rather than from the weather, though the weather does the name no harm. Long Gulch, a narrow inlet cut into the eastern coast, is the one piece of dramatic ground on an otherwise level island.

History

The name Bleaker is a corruption of "Breaker Island", after the waves that break on it, and the island was also once called Long Island. It has been a sheep farm for over a hundred years, managed in the early 20th century by Arthur Cobb, a well-known farmer and amateur naturalist who wrote a book on the islands illustrated with his own photographs. Its low profile caused many shipwrecks, five of them in the first quarter of the 20th century, the best known the French tall ship Cassard, which ran aground on the southern tip with a cargo of coal in May 1906. Since 1999 Mike and Phyll Rendell have run it as an organic sheep and cattle farm, building Cobb's Cottage and a house called The Outlook in 2000 and Cassard House in 2011, and in 2017 Nell Stevens published Bleaker House, a memoir of her months on the island (Wikipedia, Bleaker Island).

The landscape

• The walkable scale - colonies reachable on foot from the settlement.
• The shag colony - imperial shags nesting on the coast.
• The penguin species - gentoo, magellanic and rockhopper all breeding.
• The pond - freshwater drawing waterfowl near the settlement.

When to go

October to March is the breeding season. Rockhoppers arrive in October and leave by April. Winter has almost no wildlife.

What to expect

Accommodation is a single self-catering lodge and must be booked well ahead. FIGAS flights are weather-dependent. There is no shelter anywhere on the walks and the wind is constant.

Nearby

Sea Lion Island is west, and Stanley is northeast.

Key facts