Interactions between eddies and mean flow are essential to close the momentum budget of the Southern Ocean, as well as to determine the structure of the global meridional overturning circulation. Both the structure of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and the eddy dynamics arising at its heart are important for water-mass circulation and global ocean ventilation, and therefore for the global climate. However, the characterization of the eddy fields of heat and momentum are still poorly sampled by direct observations, and are difficult to accurately resolve or parameterize in numerical models. Here we present observation-based eddy statistics and eddy heat flux (EHF) from a consistent dataset, and estimate Southern Ocean surface EHF from direct measurements without any parameterization assumption. Observations obtained from near-surface drifters represent a very useful dataset to analyze the eddy field because of their ability to catch a large number of scales of motion while providing a quasi-synoptic coverage of the investigated area.