Falklands. Part II. West Falkland

December 5–7, 2013

West Falkland is separated from East Falkland by a straight. Only a hundred people live here.

You can wait for an inconvenient ferry, or you can take a small plane.

The town of Port Howard, which counts half a hundred residents, is notable for the fact that every house has a semicircular military hangar repurposed as a shed.

One of the farmers has opened an Anglo-Argentinian war museum in the shed on his property.

The exhibits include various Argentinian military artifacts.

West Falkland doesn’t have any cattle grates, because West Falkland doesn’t really have any roads. But it definitely has cattle. So all the gates have to be closed by hand. Every resident of the island has to drive up to a gate, get out of his car, open the gate, drive in, get out of the car again, close the gate, and then keep driving. Sometimes it seems like this ritual is the only thing keeping the locals from losing their minds out of boredom.

The true owners of West Falkland are penguins and sheep.

The penguins.

The penguins are like people and only seem cute from a distance.

Up close, they’re a shrill and smelly mob.

At the first sign of danger, the penguins abandon their eggs or their young and run away. But this is great for the Falkland Islanders, because penguin egg omelette is a national delicacy.

Their roost also makes a good wind rose: penguins always shit downwind. So you can instantly see the prevailing winds.

Wreckage from Argentinian fighter planes can still be found lying in the tall grass.

The sheep.

They take a sheep. Or rather, drag it.

Haul it over to the workstation.

And begin to shear it.

Until it’s completely bald.

The shorn sheep is sent back into the pen.

The fleece is thrown on a table.

Here, all the crud is picked off the wool.

An experienced appraiser classes the fleeces into different bales.

The finer and softer the wool, the higher the class.

The fleeces are packed tightly into the bales.

Then a special machine compresses them, after which the bales are sewn shut.

The weight of one bale is close to 200 kilograms.

Before:

After:

Sheep farmers are no strangers to humor.

The shorn sheep are released back out to pasture. Sheep are hardy animals, and the scars from the trimmer heal quickly, so no one makes much of an effort to avoid wounding the sheep when shearing them.

Borges once called the Falklands War «a fight between two bald men over a comb.»

If only the sheep knew.