'My Christmas will be surrounded by penguins'

While a lot of us may be hoping for a white Christmas, Aoife McKenna is excited to know she will be spending the festive season surrounded by snow and penguins.

The 24-year-old, from Derby, is working for the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust (UKAHT), managing the world's southernmost museum in Port Lockroy, a British Antarctic base on Goudier Island, from the beginning of November to the end of March.

She is part of a team of five who over Christmas will be hosting visitors from cruise ships, counting penguins, and hoping to welcome the arrival of the first chicks of the season.

She said it could be "the most Christmassy Christmas I've had, which is really, really lovely".

On the island there is also a post office - which Ms McKenna said saw 18,000 postcards pass through per season - and a gift shop.

She says throughout the festive period, including Christmas Eve, Boxing Day, and New Year's Day, cruise ships will stop on the island - which is about the size of a football pitch - and it can only take a maximum of 40 visitors at once.

So, Ms McKenna will be busy working in the museum.

"We're really getting to the peak of the Antarctic summer, and that means the peak of the tourist season," she said.

She also has to help with checking on the penguins, and they were expecting the first chicks of the season to hatch during Christmas week.

"It's a really fun part of the job," she said.

"There are about 1,000 gentoo penguins living here at Port Lockroy, so 500 breeding pairs, and part of our responsibility is to monitor them.

"When those eggs hatch, which we hope is going to be really soon, we will be counting the number of chicks.

"From our egg count, we had 938 eggs, which is really, really exciting. It's a really good number."

She says the UKAHT charity took over running Port Lockroy in 1996 - and the penguin count has been taking place since.

Although the island is small, the "area that's accessible to us is even smaller", she added.

"Because, of course, the 1,000 penguins that live here take over most of the space of the island," Ms McKenna said.

"We keep our distance from them because it's their territory, especially now during the breeding season. So they very much have the run of the island here."

She added: "They smell really, really quite bad. That's kind of their one flaw."

Ms McKenna also said it was "amazing" to see the whales in the bay and seals which had visited the island.

On Christmas Day itself, her and the team - which is made up of base leader Lou Hoskin, wildlife monitor Maggie Coll, postmaster George Clarke and shop manager Dale Ellis - will have the day off.

Ms McKenna, who previously worked as a museum curator in Inverness, Scotland, said: "I'm looking forward to having some quiet time, and just celebrating together as a little group of five.

"Obviously I'm going to miss my friends and family."

She said they would be having a lie-in, exchanging handmade Secret Santa gifts, playing games, talking to family, and enjoying some Christmas cheese they had been gifted by one of the ships.

It had been challenging making the presents, "because we don't really have any privacy or space to ourselves", Ms McKenna said.

She said they lived in a structure like a Nissen hut - an Army structure - where they shared a bunk room and had no running water or flushing toilets.

She said they had 16 jerry cans they filled with fresh water from ships.

"They also do our laundry, give us fresh food sometimes, and we take our showers on board," Ms McKenna said.

The team also live in constant daylight, which Ms McKenna said was "a big adjustment".

"I don't get hungry at the same times, tired at the same times," she said.

"We have to be really conscious about getting to a point in the evening and closing all the blackout blinds."

It does not stop the team having a fantastic time though.

Ms McKenna added: "It's been a very long time since I've seen snow at Christmas so being able to have a white Christmas here, with all the penguins, is like a dream come true."

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