Qualla: Jason Islands

Jason Islands: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit *christopher* from San Francisco, USA, CC BY 2.0. On the morning of 24 January 1600, a Flemish sea captain named Sebald de Weert, beaten back toward the Strait of Magellan by storms on his way home to the Netherlands, sighted three small islets that appeared on none of his charts. He tried to land and could not; the sea would not let him. He marked them down anyway, and for nearly two centuries the whole Falkland archipelago was known to Europe as the Sebald Islands. Those three specks were the Jason Islands, flung out to the far north-west of West Falkland, and they remain among the wildest places in the South Atlantic.

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Image: *christopher* from San Francisco, USA | CC BY 2.0

Jason Islands: Sharply Rising Peaks

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit michael clarke stuff, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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-si...

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Image: michael clarke stuff | CC BY-SA 2.0

Jason Islands: The Greatest Albatross City on Earth

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. 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 ne...

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Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Jason Islands: A Kingdom of One Man's Making

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. 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...

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Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Jason Islands: Given Back to the Wild

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit michael clarke stuff, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 Steinha...

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Image: michael clarke stuff | CC BY-SA 2.0