The Jasons are a string of islands and islets with names like Steeple, Grand, Elephant and Flat, most of them ringed by cliffs and carpeted in dense tussac grass that grows head-high. Steeple Jason is cinched in the middle by a narrow neck of land that splits it into two steep-sided halves. Grand Jason, the largest, rises to high plateaux cut by gullies; Elephant Jason runs along a ridge more than 200 metres tall. The conservationist Ian Strange, who knew this archipelago as well as anyone, wrote that the Jasons' "sharply rising peaks give them a grandeur found in few other areas" of the Falklands. Standing offshore in a swell, it is easy to see what he meant.

Steeple Jason holds a record that staggers anyone who witnesses it: the largest colony of black-browed albatrosses in the world, a living city of birds packed into a band that runs for miles along the shore. Surveys have counted well over a hundred thousand breeding pairs, the nests so close together that the slope looks frosted with white. The wider Jason group is a globally recognised Important Bird Area, home as well to roughly 140,000 pairs of southern rockhopper penguins, thousands of gentoos, southern giant petrels, and the striated caracara, a bold and inquisitive bird of prey that the islanders nicknamed the "Johnny rook." Striated caracaras are among the rarest raptors on the planet, and here they thrive.

The slaughter came first. Between 1864 and 1866, roughly two million rockhopper and gentoo penguins were killed on the Jasons and boiled down for their oil. A century later the islands found an unlikely champion. In March 1970 they were bought by Len Hill, an Englishman who ran a bird sanctuary called Birdland in the Cotswold village of Bourton-on-the-Water. Offered the islands for ten thousand pounds, Hill talked the price down to five and a half thousand on the condition that the sheep be removed. To fund the conservation work, he printed his own Jason Islands stamps and, later, his own banknotes, signed "Len Hill, Administrator" and valid until the end of 1979. Collectors prize them still.

In the 1990s the New York philanthropist Michael Steinhardt bought Steeple Jason and Grand Jason and gave them to the Wildlife Conservation Society, the body that runs the Bronx Zoo, along with the money to build a research station named for himself and his wife Judy. The Steinhardt field station, completed in 2003, lets scientists live on Steeple Jason for stretches at a time, monitoring the seabirds. No one lives here permanently. In the 1920s a single Falkland Islands policeman was stationed on the group to deter foreign seal poachers, and shepherds once grazed sheep until overgrazing scarred the land. Today the sheep are gone, the islands are run as nature reserves, and apart from mice on Steeple Jason, they remain free of the introduced predators that have devastated wildlife elsewhere.