Return of Bird of the Week: Brown Skua

The Skua is the bad boy of the Southern Ocean. Egg stealer, penguin chick grabber, bully, carrion eater, kleptoparasite; by human standards, this is a bad bird. They work in pairs to steal Gentoo Penguin eggs, with one distracting the penguin and the other stealing the egg. They are smart, skilled predators. But in the hour or so that WC watched this particular Gentoo colony, no Skua raid was successful. The taxonomy of Skuas is hotly disputed. Some ornithologists have as many as three species; other insist that all Skuas are subspecies of the Great Skua. Certainly there were color…