As Levick amasses his data slowly on the sexual and social behavior of Adelie penguins at Cape Adare, his notes, written in blue-black ink, reveal that the penguins themselves hasten quickly as they go about the business of breeding. With only a narrow window when conditions in the Antarctic are favorable for breeding, the penguins are in a race to fledge their chicks before the weather turns and their food supplies disappear. When he first arrived at Cape Adare in February 1911, near the end of the previous breeding season, Levick had witnessed the fate of those chicks whose parents attempted to breed too late: they were abandoned and left to die before they could mature well enough to fend for themselves. His dissection of an emaciated fledgling had confirmed that it had starved to death, with the rocks in its stomach having made a poor substitute for food. In the Antarctic, survival and success rely on the same things: timing and food.
It is October 20, 1911. Five men—Roald Amundsen, Oscar Wisting, Olav Bjaaland, Sverre Hassel, and Helmer Hanssen—depart from Framheim for the South Pole, taking four sledges and fifty-two dogs with them. The race for the pole has finally begun.
They are dressed in the clothing of the Netsiliks and the dogs are harnessed in the way of the Netsiliks—things Amundsen had learned when completing his childhood dream of the Northwest Passage. Four underperforming dogs are set free and left to find their own way back to Framheim, if they can (a couple do). As the men make their way to their first depot at 80°S, they encounter a very thick fog, yet Amundsen is ecstatic. They are able to navigate and find the depot easily using the flags they had set out before the winter. It is “a brilliant test,” he notes, of their meticulous precautions and preparations.
At their depot they have food aplenty, as it had originally been set up with an eight-man expedition in mind. They load the sledges with the gear and food that had been left there on their first, injudicious, attempt to get away over a month earlier. Now that the race has really begun and the conditions for the Norwegians seem good, they are, as Amundsen records on October 24, 1911, “enjoying life.”
It is October 24, 1911. Just as Amundsen and his four companions are “enjoying life” at their 80°S depot, Scott’s complex plan for getting to the South Pole, which is nine hundred miles away from their base at Cape Evans, at last, gets underway.
Two motor sledges and four men set off across the frozen sea ice, with each sledge pulling a commendable one and a half tons of supplies slowly, very slowly. For that reason, the main party, consisting of men and ponies, is to leave a week later.
On the morning of November 1, 1911, a line of eight ponies, each pulling a loaded sledge and each accompanied by a man, sets out across the sea ice heading for the former Discovery Expedition’s hut at Hut Point. A line of dark gray figures, they disappear into the nothingness and grayness of an Antarctic day that threatens blizzards and snow. At Hut Point, they pick up another two ponies and their attendants, who had gone ahead on account of the two ponies being so slow.
Five days after leaving Hut Point, the caravan of ten ponies and ten men comes across the two motor sledges, broken down and abandoned. Of the two, the one to get furthest had managed to cover a mere fifty miles from Cape Evans. The four men who had been with the motor sledges had depoted some of the food and fuel, then proceeded to carry on with the rest, pulling the sledges themselves with nearly four hundred miles to the base of the Beardmore Glacier still ahead of them.
From the outset, Lawrence “Titus” Oates, the man in charge of the ponies, has complained that the ponies are not really up to the task:
A more unpromising lot of ponies to start a journey such as ours it would be almost impossible to conceive.
Indeed, the ponies are proving not the most ideal means of transport in the blizzards and snow that now confront them on the barrier. Their feet sink into the snow, forcing Scott to switch to “night” marching when, even though it remains daylight, the temperatures are lower and the surface of the snow is firmer. Icicles form on the ponies’ eyelashes and occlude their vision. When they stop, the men must build snow walls to help protect the ponies from the wind because they do not suffer the cold well. Oates writes in his diary, with what seems like a measure of satisfaction:
Scott realizes now what awful cripples our ponies are and carries a face like a tired old sea boat in consequence.
A week after leaving, the main party becomes tent-bound, stalled by a blizzard too awful for the ponies to be harnessed to their sledges and expected to walk into the wind-driven snow with its wicked windchill. Yet a third element of Scott’s complex plan that involves a combination of different means of travel and supporting parties waltzes into the camp seemingly untroubled by the conditions. It is the two dog teams with their drivers Meares and Demitri Gerov. They had left Cape Evans last and were not expected to rendezvous with the main party and the motor sledges until 80°30´S, somewhat beyond the One Ton Depot. Yet, here they are now, a week ahead of schedule, within one hundred miles of Cape Evans and miles before One Ton Depot. The dogs have traveled quickly and, when at rest, lie under the snow drift untroubled by the blizzard conditions. The unvoiced truth, laid bare for all to see, is that Amundsen has chosen the best means of travel. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who is sharing a tent with Scott, notes in his diary that even Scott thinks “Amundsen with his dogs may be doing much better.”
Apart from the undeniable differences in the way the dogs and ponies travel and withstand the Antarctic conditions, another lies in what they eat. Whereas the dogs can be fed on locally available seal meat, and even their own companions, the nearest food available for the ponies must come from New Zealand, 2,500 miles away, and it is bulky. In an effort to cut down on the bulk of forage needed to be carried with them on the sledges, Scott’s party have supplemented the ponies’ feed with oats and oilcake, but these are not adequate nutritionally. All the ponies are losing condition. Scott is forced to start sacrificing them and to feed their meat to the dogs. Originally, he had intended that the dogs would come only about halfway to the Beardmore Glacier, but now he has no choice but to take the dogs much further. At the same time, Scott has abandoned any pretense that they might be able to take the ponies onto the Beardmore Glacier itself.
It is October 24, 1911. As Amundsen’s men and dogs sit feasting on the food at their first depot on their expedition to get to the South Pole, and the motor sledges of Scott set out from Cape Evans to begin the Englishman’s attempt to be first to the same geographic pole, Murray Levick is stuck at Cape Adare and going nowhere. Instead, he is left observing the Adelie penguins and their race to breed successfully in the short Antarctic summer.
It is snowing and a cold wind is blowing hard from the southeast. Clouds cover the sun and the light levels are low. Levick notes that the birds lie flat on their nests, heads facing away from the wind, and that penguins throughout the colony have become “noticeably subdued,” with very little activity at all. By the afternoon, the wind drops, the cloud lifts, and the light levels improve dramatically, with the consequence that the penguins resume their frantic “love making, fighting, and building” of their nests.
Levick focuses on the fighting he observes within the colony, which he ascribes pretty much exclusively to competition between the males.
. . . the roar of battles & thuds of blows can be heard over the entire rookery, and of the hundreds of such fights I have witnessed, all have plainly had their cause in rivalry over the hens.
Despite his admonition to the other men of the Northern Party that they must be certain of anything they record as fact, Levick assumes that if two birds are fighting, they must be males, or “cocks,” as he insists on calling them. Indeed, an entry in his Zoological Notes says as much:
I conclude when I see two birds fight with flippers alone, that they are cocks.
Even those birds fighting with beaks he believes to be males competing with each other for the “hens.” He cites an instance where he sees a penguin with its eye “put out” by another’s beak, leaving the right side of its face covered with blood.
Murray Levick’s account of the penguins, as captured in his book Antarctic Penguins, with the exception of a little bit of argy-bargy among the males, describes a routine kind of domesticity:
. . . it was not unusual to see a strange cock paying court to a mated hen in the absence of her husband until he returned to drive away the interloper, but I do not think that this ever occurred after the eggs had come and the regular family life begun . . .
While male Adelie penguins tend to be slightly larger than females, there is much overlap in their sizes, and this is further complicated by the dramatic fluctuation in their weight that occurs depending upon the amount of time they have been onshore and fasting. Levick’s mistake, a prejudice born of his times, is to assume that whenever two animals are fighting, it is likely they are males and that it is the females that incubate the eggs first. As my intensive observations would later show, he is wrong on both counts.
While Levick is not able accurately to determine the sex of the birds he is observing, he can readily distinguish new arrivals to the colony. Their breasts are sparkling white and clean, while the breasts of birds that have been in the colony for a few days or more are covered in reddish-brown guano stains from lying on the ground. This allows him to make one of his most startling observations, which he records in his Zoological Notes.
Several times I have seen fresh cocks making love to mated hens who have shown no evasion to them until the mated cock has suddenly turned up and fought the interloper.
It is the first intimations of the mate switching I will observe over seven decades later; it is the beginnings of his realization that the sexual behavior of Adelie penguins is nothing at all like what a Victorian gentleman might have supposed it to be.
Two days later, Levick makes another observation in his blue notebook: three male penguins newly arrived at the colony, as evidenced by their “spotlessly clean” white breasts, are near a female. Her sex is unequivocally evident from the dirty tread marks down her back left by the “love making” from a previous partner, marking her, in Levick’s estimation, as “unquestionably an old arrival and a bride long past her virginity.” One of these males approaches the female and is initially rebuffed. After a bit of a brawl with the other two new arrivals, he tries again and, despite the protestations of the female as she pecks him, he persists in lying next to her until he is at last accepted by her.
This too fits with my mate-switching observations and runs counter to the perceived wisdom that persisted in the penguin world for so long after Levick: that penguins are monogamous and mate for life.
That same day, October 27, 1911, Cape Adare is hit by a frightful storm. This time the activity in the colony virtually stops, and the wind is so strong that the birds face into it, allowing the wind to pass over their streamlined and interlocking feathers, leaving an undisturbed layer of air trapped next to their skin to provide some insulation; a sort of biological equivalent of double glazing.
It is at this time that Levick notices a penguin that has collected two pieces of sharply edged white quartz stone for its nest, rather than the rounded black basalt pebbles usually found on the beach. While Levick watches, a neighbor “put out its beak and stole one of the pieces!” Campbell is witness to the incident too. In a sign that the penguin study is assuming greater importance for Levick than the exploration that was their original goal, he laments, “Unfortunately I am going away sledging for four days . . .” Consequently, he asks Campbell to check on whether the quartz pieces continue to be transferred to other nests by this penguin pilfering.
It is a brilliant piece of scientific insight, a look into the mind of a natural experimenter. It will take decades before anyone thinks to do likewise: to paint pebbles and record how they are stolen and passed from nest to nest in the colony. It turns out that the stones typically move from the nests on the outside of a subcolony to the central ones. The central nests are better protected from the skuas and benefit from the largesse that their neighboring nests provide, in terms of stones that can be pilfered given the right opportunity. As a result, central nests tend to be occupied by older, experienced breeders, and their nests are often the most elaborate in terms of the number of stones lining their floor and walls.
These stones are not just for decoration. Elsewhere, Levick records how meltwater from the snow swamps nests and destroys the eggs. On one occasion, he and Browning find what he assumes is a female sitting on eggs in a nest with no stones. In fact, it is likely to be a male given that this is the first incubation spell—but no matter. The point is that the penguin is trying to sit on eggs “amidst a slush of melting snow, so that the eggs were nearly floating in water.” Browning and Levick add stones to the nest that they take from neighbors and then replace the eggs, lifting them out of the water, which the bird then resumes incubating. It says something again about Levick’s heart and also, in particular, the importance and value of stones to the penguins: they are their currency.
When Levick leaves Cape Adare, he travels with Browning back to Duke of York Island, arriving on October 31, where he is surprised to find 1,500–2,000 penguins nesting in the valley inland from Crescent Bay; the one where he had found the carcass of a penguin tied to a rock by one of Borchgrevink’s party. No eggs can be found, though he looks carefully with Browning. To Levick, “the most striking fact about this rookery seemed to me to be the absence of open water for many miles, and the scant likelihood of there being any for at least another month or perhaps more.” It is evident to him that these birds must be prepared to face a long fast during the first part of their breeding season.
Levick returns to Cape Adare on November 4, a day after Campbell has recorded the appearance of the first penguin egg in the Cape Adare colony. Either Campbell did not make any observations of the quartz stones or he saw nothing of consequence during Levick’s absence, as there is no further record of them.
While Levick writes occasional references in his notes to the marked pairs in nests 1–6 in Group A and the nest containing the injured bird, the observations start to become less frequent, and by November 20, he laments that “my photography (chiefly in work with Priestley) is taking a great amount of time that I have little left for other work.”
Presumably this is why Levick never really nails the nest relief patterns of the Adelie penguins. He notes that “Mated couples appear to fast absolutely until the first egg is laid, after which they go off to feed by turns.” But without systematic and, importantly, frequent observations of his marked pairs, he seems not to get that it is the female that departs for sea first after both eggs are laid and that then she is away for about two weeks.
Ironically, Priestly has been doing this for him to some extent. When Priestley takes his regular meteorological observations, he monitors the nest attendance of a pair nesting near the meteorological station, noting when the sitting bird is relieved by its mate. The only problem with this—apart from its singular sample size—is that the sexes of the birds are unknown and, like Levick (or more likely upon Levick’s advice), Priestley assumes that the bird taking the initial incubation spell is the female.
Yet, that aside, when I pull out my 1914 battered green-covered copy of Antarctic Penguins in my cabin on the Shokalskiy, there on pages 91–93 are Priestley’s records of the nest attendance. They show the first incubation spell was thirteen days. This would almost certainly have been the male sitting on the egg while the female was away at sea feeding. Then the female returned and took the second incubation spell, which also lasted thirteen days. Once the female was relieved, she went away for four days and, thereafter, coinciding with the hatching of their chick, they alternated nest attendance every day or two. It is about as typical a nest relief pattern as one can get for Adelie penguins. Yet Levick does not seem to grasp its significance.
Instead, in his book, he falls back to the quaint writing that I had found of such limited value when I had first taken it with me to Cape Bird in 1977. He writes, “the couples took turn and turn about on the nest, one remaining to guard and incubate while the other went off to the water.” But he then gives in to the kind of anthropomorphism that is completely at odds with the scientific version of Levick that I have started to get to know, such as when he describes birds returning from the first feeding trip to sea and stopping to linger with other penguins on the ice-covered beach. While he erroneously assumes that they are males, I haven’t got a problem with that, but I do with the way he expresses himself:
. . . they were sociable animals, glad to meet one another, and, like many men, pleased with the excuse to forget for a while their duties at home, where their mates were waiting to be relieved for their own spell off the nests.
Where, oh where, has Levick the scientist gone, the man who marked nests and individual penguins, the man with the means to uncover even more than he did? It seems that during this period, Levick the Photographer has trumped Levick the Scientist, and so he spends a lot of time down at the ice edge, photographing penguins leaping into the water or out of it, as well as penguins porpoising. Even with modern digital cameras with their autofocus systems and autoexposure, such actions are not easy to capture. Given his equipment and inexperience, Levick’s photographs are quite remarkable in that regard. However, they could only have been achieved by spending time doing that at the expense of time spent monitoring his nests.
A few days later, on November 24, 1911, Levick records that the skuas “are stealing a large number of eggs.” However, six days later, he notes that “a large number of nests in the rookery are now to be seen deserted.” At first, Levick puts this down to the skuas taking the eggs and mostly wonders what has become of the parent birds. Although he goes on to speculate that while the eggs in some nests “may have first been filched by skuas, and the nest then deserted,” some accident to the eggs, which caused them to be exposed, could produce the same result. At any rate, he emphasizes that “the number of deserted nests is now very great indeed.”
Four more days and on December 4, 1911, he states that “The number of deserted nests continues to increase.” Furthermore, according to him, “A large number of desertions seem to be due to the eggs getting rolled out of the nests accidentally, as many are to be found on the ground, frozen, which have not yet been eaten by skuas.” In reality, he has missed the boat again. The timing of these desertions corresponds to birds left fasting on the nest and being unrelieved by their partners. Eventually they desert and that is why Levick finds the unattended eggs lying within the subcolonies, presumably knocked out of their nests by the movements of the colony’s dwellers rather than fighting between the males, which seems to be Levick’s fallback position every time he suspects aggression.
I daresay the cocks are the greater offenders in this respect . . .
Levick had all the right ingredients in his study to have gotten this. He had marked birds in marked nests. He had only to monitor them daily to be able to pick up the pattern, the nest relief pattern, noting which bird was present and for how long. But perhaps he was being my Eivind Astrup rather than my Sherpa? Perhaps he was showing me a means of travel that I could use later rather than his doing the traveling before me?