Yorke Bay

It faces northwards into Port William, with Canopus Hill to the south, and is known internationally as a breeding site for the threatened Magellanic penguin.

[1] Prior to the war, Yorke Bay was a popular summer swimming and recreation site for local residents, but the entire northern coast of the Port Stanley Airport peninsula (including Yorke Bay) have been fenced and marked as strictly off-limits since a tractor and bulldozer were destroyed by an anti-tank mine while attempting to lay a pipeline in the area in 1986.

[2] A Cranfield University assessment dismissing the feasibility of demining Yorke Bay noted that the sand dunes had expanded considerably since 1982, burying the mines too deeply for advanced detection equipment and disrupting the orderly lines in which they were originally laid.

To recover them all would thus require mass excavation of the entire beach area with armored digging equipment, a task that would be expensive, dangerous, unlikely to definitively succeed, and certain to do severe damage to the "internationally important" Magellanic penguin rookeries.

[3] Local residents and officials have also expressed opposition to the idea: Falklands Governor Howard Pearce stated that the high probability that "only 95 percent" of the mines would end up being accounted for would actually "bring a sense of complacency to the community and increase rather than reduce the chance of injury.