Above San Diego, a smooth blue sky stretched to the horizon. The Pacific Ocean kept tapping its brains on the coast. The air felt like hot silk as you inhaled. It was spring in Southern California, and at Sea World the male turtles busily courted the females by swimming straight up to them, staring them in the face, and waving their feet in a come-to-me gesture. Flamboyant, stilty flamingos had already built volcano-shaped nests for their young, using their beaks as trowels. My destination was an old prefab freezer behind the Penguin Encounter and a heavy door that opened like a meat locker. Just inside, in a cramped cloakroom, green medical clothes hung from pegs, a row of black rubber boots stood below them as if left by a brigade of firefighters, and street clothes threatened to cascade from a high shelf. Like a decompression chamber, an air lock, or locker room, the cloakroom was the place where different worlds converged and linked with visible humanity: satchels, hats, purses, nametags—belongings—stowed with familiar gestures of care or disregard. Adding my clothes to the blur, I suited up, dipped my booted feet in a dishpan of disinfectant, and opened the door to Penguin Quarantine.
A rush of cold air chilled my face, a smell of oiled leather dusted with salt hit my nose, and I heard a fugue of high whistles that struck the ear right on the edge of pain. In twenty white wooden cribs scattered at floor level around the cold room, big, fluffy penguin chicks stood upright and toddled, whistled to the handlers, beak-fenced with one another, or peered over their cribs. Only six weeks old, these roly-poly king-penguin babies had a thick brownish down, like a carpet of the deepest plush pile. When not waddling around the crib or roughhousing with each other, they watched the roomful of bustling humans, whom they had adopted as their parents. Never mind that we were the wrong color, wrong size, had the wrong smell and wrong sound for adult king penguins. When their natural mothers gave birth to them on the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, it was already late in the season—too late for most of the chicks, which hatch from pear-shaped eggs, to survive. Frank Todd, formerly corporate curator of birds at Sea World in San Diego, collected these chicks as doomed eggs and brought them back in incubators and padded sea chests, to rear safely and then to distribute among the country’s four Sea Worlds.
Each crib was lined with smooth dark pebbles of the sort they would find on South Georgia, and the cribs were arranged in rows, with narrow alleyways between them. If this was a rookery, it was an odd one of wood, paint, cement, and—strangest of all—a ceiling, but the essential layout seemed right. The short, potbellied penguins, whose necks wobbled with baby fat, huddled together like Russian businessmen in fur coats. Occasionally, one batted a neighbor away with its small flipper. Raucous, shrill, they high-whistled with operatic strength and waddled around their cribs to get a better view of the human beings, crying to each passerby to stop and feed them, cuddle them, or play. Weaving their beaks back and forth, they wrenched emotion from you, and now and then squirted a stream of yellow from their rear ends.
In a side room known as the kitchen, staff biologists and some of the one hundred or so volunteers tended the incubators and hand-reared fresh hatchlings. Two young men prepared the babies’ formula, which they called penguin milkshake (a gruel of krill, predigested protein, Half & Half, herring fillets, and vitamins, kept at 90° F.), in pots of hot water and tested its warmth. The littlest babies were fed five times a day, the larger ones four times. A local hospital had donated two incubators it used for preemies, and inside the incubators, kept at a constant temperature and humidity, naked hatchlings flopped all over themselves in the spastic disarray we associate with newborns. Their eyes were not yet focused and alert, and they could manage only a weak little whistle. On the table in the center of the room a shoebox held cookies someone’s mom had baked: white iced Scottie dogs and green iced turtles. One volunteer separated eight colors of yarn and made up flipper bands, which had to be changed every few days because the chicks grew so rapidly. With everyone wearing green medical clothes, the kitchen looked like an intensive-care ward, and everything was scrupulously clean. Penguins are unlikely carriers of disease, but U.S. poultry farmers fear contagion, so when Sea World brings back penguin eggs, the staff must go into quarantine with them for thirty days. A large dishpan of disinfectant was at every doorway, and volunteers in rubber boots dipped their feet hundreds of times in the course of their shift.
The air was cold enough to make my breath steam, but not the breath of baby penguins. Slender black beaks turned toward me, and pairs of black eyes, soft and glossy. The curiosity of penguins in the wild is legendary. They have been known to walk right up to scientists and carefully handle and study them. Penguins have no land predators. So they do not instinctively fear people. Just the opposite: They’re curious and alert, and the babies waddle around like human two-year-olds, eager to untie one’s shoelace, slide a beak up one’s sweater sleeve, or muss one’s bangs.
In a back room, which was kept warmer, I found a white wooden diapering table and more cribs, this time full of chicks only fourteen to sixteen days old, which looked much more fetal and helpless than those in the cold room. A heat lamp, attached to each crib, bathed them in red light. In each crib, six chicks huddled together—gawky, rubbery, scruffy. Sections of skin looked like black oilcloth tufted with stringy would-be feathers—down that was just beginning to form. Their whistle was a faint urgent chirp, and when they tried to sit up, they rocked unsteadily and leaned all over each other. They liked to sit with their heads tucked together at the center of a circle, as if conferring in private about the decline in the quality of care, or playing one-potato-two-potato. They needed the heat lamp and their collective body heat to stay warm. In the wild, hundreds of baby penguins huddle, with those at the outer edges frantically trying to push their way into the middle. A small animal has more surface area relative to its body mass than a large animal does, so it loses heat fast and has to make up for it with a high metabolic rate. A good example of this is a shrew, a little mammal whose metabolic rate is so high it has to feed all the time.
Occasionally, a penguin chick stood up and toppled forward onto its beak in a clumsy lunge, picked itself up, and toddled around again. White terry-cloth towels laid out over the pebbles in each crib provided a surface soft and motherlike to sit on and protect their beaks when they fell over, as they inevitably did. The towels and human attentions were no replacement for the constant touching they would have had in the wild, but every touch helps. From the time it hatches, a baby king penguin stands on a parent’s feet and presses into the parent’s tummy, against a toasty area just for that purpose, the brood patch (or pouch). Father and mother take turns holding the chick, which wouldn’t survive long on the icy ground. Nuzzling is instinctive. After all, it takes between ten and thirteen months to fledge in the wild—a long time to be exposed to the cold and wet, and to surprise attacks from hungry, dive-bombing skuas.
I like handling newborn animals. Fallen into life from an unmappable world, they are the ultimate immigrants, full of wonder and confusion. Gathering a chick up in my hands, I lifted it by the feet and rump and held it close to my body to support its neck as I carried it to the diapering table. One has to be careful of the air sacs under the wings, which can be easily damaged. While heat lamps coated it in a warm glow, it sat on a towel with its rump against my belly, nestling against its ersatz mother, and mewed gently. The baby looked like an old weathered tennis ball whose covering had frayed. First, I checked its general health and pinched a little of the skin on the back of its neck. If the skin stood up, the penguin might be dehydrated. I checked its scruffy, leprous-looking skin, which was normal for a hatchling. The baby sat quietly as I measured its beak with calipers. Kings are docile penguins, although alert, and do not seem to mind our measuring the length of their feet and flippers, or their weight. I set the chick on a digital scale and wriggled my fingers over its head like a spider to hold its attention so it wouldn’t toddle away. It turned its neck around and scratched its shoulder.
“Honey, you don’t got nothing to preen. What are you preening? You’re still naked,” Carol Strilich, a staff member, said as she jotted down the figures from the scale.
I returned the chick to the towel and rested it against my tummy. Carol and Chuck Williams, another staff member, picked up chicks of their own. Swiveling, I reached across the table to grab a small mackerel fillet, and Carol called, “Watch it!” pointing to my chick, which had quickly backed up to the edge of the table and begun to topple. My hand caught it. Even though it couldn’t stand properly yet, evolution had gifted it with thigmotaxis, an overwhelming drive to press up hard against a parent. When I reached for a fish, it scooted back to find my body. If we had been mother and child, we would constantly be making “spoons.” To see how thigmotaxis worked, I set the chick against my tummy and cupped my hands over its head and shoulders, making a warm living pouch for it. Quieting, it looked up at me, blinked, opened its mouth, and whistled to be fed. Normally, it would tap on its mother’s beak and the mother would open her beak and pour regurgitated fish down its throat. Just the sight of a parent’s open beak would be signal enough for the baby to open its beak and get ready for lunch. I opened my mouth wide and leaned over in what I imagined would be a penguin mother’s posture, but my mouth was not the right shape to trigger the baby’s beak to open. Carol laughed. This had been tried before. However, there was one sure-fire thing to do. Making a V of my first two fingers, I slid them over the baby’s beak, which sprang open. As with many animals, it’s the right shape that matters, the right semaphore. With my other hand, I slid a syringe full of formula down the baby’s gullet, slowly pushed in the plunger, and pulled it out when empty. The formula must make it past the trachea or the penguin will stop swallowing. Like human beings, they have a gag response. This I followed with two herring fillets, the baby’s first taste of whole fish. The exact amount of food had been worked out beforehand. Carol kept a logbook of weights and feedings, and at this stage, the chicks were fed 10 percent of their morning weight. They should grow about 5 percent each day.
Carol, Chuck, and the other biologists, zoologists, and volunteers had been raising all kinds of penguin chicks, but the king babies were unanimous favorites.
“Some of the gentoo chicks we had last time would run right off the table,” Carol said. “Emperor chicks would turn around and try to nail you with their beaks. Chinstrap babies are cute as can be but a real handful. They’re constantly snapping at and bickering with each other. But king babies are so affectionate. They just want to nuzzle.”
“Most penguins aren’t endangered,” I said, “and yet you’re raising them with extraordinary care.”
“But they’re extremely sensitive to disturbance And they live in a fragile ecosystem. We’re hand-rearing them now, before they’re endangered and … well, the world being what it is … if there’s a problem in the future, then we’ll be all set to help. If only we had done that earlier with the condor.” She slid her fingers over her chick’s beak and fed it a long swill of formula followed by two small fillets. Then she weighed it again and carefully returned it to its crib. Because their stomachs are so full, the penguins sometimes vomit up their food while being set back in their cribs, so handlers must be exquisitely light-handed with them after a meal. Chuck weighed his chick, then set it back on the towel in front of him and leaned over to jot down the data in his logbook, nuzzling the chick with his chin, curling it into the crook of his arm.
At day’s end, I stopped at Frank Todd’s office and found him in the midst of hundreds of pages of raw journal entries, which he was trying to make sense of for a book. A slender man with a dark mustache and a slightly windswept look, he sat surrounded by clouds of cigarette smoke in a cluttered office. This would be his sixteenth season in the Antarctic, and there were suitcases with RAF tags in one corner, patches from the Antarctic stations he’d worked at on a wall and, around the room, an array of artifacts, including a taxidermized penguin and a coffee mug that had printed on it: LIFE IS A BITCH, THEN YOU DIE. Each year, Todd made his way to the Antarctic, collected up eggs that would otherwise perish, and flew them back to San Diego, then began the intensive process of incubating and hatching the chicks in quarantine, finally sending them to the several Sea Worlds, as well as to other zoos, on long-term breeding loan.
“We keep the polar penguins in relative darkness all summer long,” Todd explained, “to provide the exact cycle of darkness and light they would find in the Antarctic. Remember, the seasons are reversed south of the equator. And when we bring back adults, we choose mated pairs, which we can determine from bioacoustics. It’s tough to move highly specialized birds. Among other things, you need a refrigerated airplane.”
“I know you have a great success rate, but do any of the hatchlings die?”
“Occasionally. Hunchbacks, for instance …”
“Hunchback penguins?”
“Oh yes. And some penguins refuse to molt on schedule or are undersized. We keep our polar penguins indoors, so we don’t have the problem with their catching avian malaria from mosquitoes. Other zoos do have that problem.”
“It can be a serious problem. In the early sixties, all the penguins at the San Diego Zoo were thought to have died of malaria.”
The Southern California sun poured through the window. “Don’t you find your life split up? The contrast must be unnerving.”
“Everybody’s life is split up. People might not want to recognize it, but it’s split up between what they do in the wintertime versus what they do in the summer. Or they devote a whole year to planning the two weeks they’re going to spend on vacation. So the fact is that in October the people around here begin to detect a change in my behavior, which they attribute to something they refer to as polar fever. I don’t consider that necessarily disruptive. It’s an aspect of my life that I consider almost normal now. In the fall, that is the northern fall, my eyes start to turn to the south. In fact, that’s the way it is for most scientists who work with penguins. We migrate, just like the animals we study.” The very idea of it made his conversation swerve into a moment of heightened emotion: “There’s no place as pristinely beautiful, where the air is clearer, the grandeur more overwhelming, the animals more fascinating. If God took a vacation on this planet, he would go to the Antarctic.”
I volunteered to spend the following day in the cold room, tending the toddlers, who were already boisterous and quite tall (between one and two feet), full of energy, and insistently affectionate. With their big round bodies and small heads they appeared to be miniature bears. Their eyes were as black as poppy seeds. Long flippers—wings, actually—hung almost to their feet. Their heads nested in rolls of soft down, and they had little paintbrush tails. The toddlers looked so different from the spectacularly colored adult penguins they would become that the first scientists who saw them thought they were a different species altogether and named them woolly penguins. When a few weeks old, penguin chicks develop their thick down, and, round at the bottom and narrow at the top, they become pot-bellied dolls.
Their high-pitched whistle is the only noise that can penetrate the din of a rookery in the wild, where perhaps a hundred thousand birds are busily feeding, nesting, mating, and quarreling about territories. When the baby is big enough to leave behind in a crèche of hundreds or even thousands of babies, the parents go off to fish, and return to find legions of identical-looking babies in the rookery’s madding crowd. It’s confusing, and in some species a number of chicks will chase after one adult, thinking it’s their parent, until eventually all but the real offspring realize they’ve made a mistake and drop out. Unimaginable as it may seem, parent and chick recognize each other by voice. Every bird has its own personal voiceprint. Just as a mother bat can recognize its pup’s unique scent, a baby penguin can recognize its mother’s whistle. I tried to imagine a rookery in which there are a hundred thousand separate, recognizably different whistles. As small as this room was compared to a rookery, it was full of confusing sounds and penguin whistles interrupting one another, overlapping or entwining until they quickly blurred into a solid wall of noise.
In Penguin Quarantine, handlers identify penguins by their flipper bands, color-coded strands of yarn or plastic encircling a flipper. Blue-red-right in the C-1 crib was the first penguin we fed in the cold room. I took the syringe, filled it with formula, made a V with my free hand to trigger the feeding response in the chick, and carefully slid the tube down the chick’s throat. The chick was to get eight silvery whole fish from a bucket. By then, all the other chicks in the crib were lunging greedily for the food, and it was hard to remember which beak to feed. When I located blue-red-right by its flipper band, I tapped the side of its beak with a fish and the beak sprang open long enough for me to slide one fish down whole, then another, then the next six. In this crib, the chicks were hefty, around fifteen pounds, and full of spunk and clangor. When we finished with the first crib, we disinfected our hands in a tub of chlorine and water and moved on to the next one. The second group got more formula but only five fish. We dipped our hands again in chlorine and water. The third crib got more formula but two and a half fish, which meant ripping smelt in half with my hands, not one of my favorite things to do, especially when blankets of roe poured out. But the wail of the hungry penguins was heartbreaking, and it was designed to be. They opened their mouths, looked up at you in anguish, and swung their beaks back and forth, while squeaking plaintively, Feed me! And if you can’t feed me, cuddle me! I leaned over and wrapped my arms around three penguin babies at once, pressed their silky down to my face, and hugged them tight. They relaxed. Then one of them put a beak up and tapped at my face. It was lunchtime. Didn’t I know anything? As we traveled down the alleyways between the cribs to feed formula and smelt, penguins behind me tried to pull the towel out of my back pocket. They shrieked to get my attention. After feeding, they quieted down and stood like sentinels.
In the last crib, F-1, six chicks wailed for food and climbed all over each other to get at the smelts. One of them, brown-white-left, was a little smaller and less forthcoming than the rest and had its own light, tinkling music-box voice. Its flipper band made it look like a veteran of war, someone who had worked out an armistice with nature. When the time came to feed it, I wrapped one arm around it, to keep the others away, and gently tapped its beak with a smelt. Nothing can tug at your parenting instincts harder than a baby penguin looking up at you, eyes moist with helplessness, crying to be fed, just to be fed. Brown-white-left held its beak open wide between fish, and I noticed that its tongue was pale and thick, like the fuzzy comb of an iris, except that it had tiny backward facing hooks, a raspy surface to hold fish and urge them down the throat.
“Mind if I stroke?” I asked brown-white-left, so that it could hear the sound of my voice. I chatted to it about summer, the Antarctic, my home in the East, as I stroked its tongue with a finger. It felt rough and slightly plastic. Then I stuck my finger down its throat and its tongue gently rasped on my finger, its neck rippling as it tried to swallow my finger. I pulled it out. “You’re just a feathered dinosaur, you know,” I told him in as high a voice as I could manage. For most animals, a growl, or anything resembling it—a low voice, for instance—signals danger. Around his eyes, a white ring of down had begun to shed and would soon be replaced by feathers, but for the moment it looked like a sunburn that had begun to peel. When I slid a hand under one of his boomerang-shaped wings, it felt warm. But his feet were quite cold. King penguins look as if they’re wearing black surgical gloves on their feet. Thanks to an adaptation known as rete mirabile, the blood in their nasal passages and feet stays the same temperature as the cold water they swim in. Blood from the warm arteries is right next to the cold venous blood, which cools it. According to the laws of thermodynamics, heat will always travel to cold. But these animals had evolved a way for that to happen inside their bodies instead of outside, so they would not get frostbite or suffer in icy weather.
Lifting him out of his crib, I set him on my rubber boots, and he instinctively pressed up against me, threw his head back, and called for me to feed him. Since he’d been fed enough for lunch, I leaned over and wrapped my arms around him and snuggled him tight. His beak, edged in thick glossy black like a vanilla bean, searched under my shirt collar and slid up my sweater sleeve. When the chicks are older, they preen themselves and coat their feathers from oil glands so that the water will run off. But at that moment he was buttery-soft and warm, like the inside of a fur-lined glove on a cold day. In the wild, one of the most critical times for a fledging chick is during a rainstorm. Snow doesn’t bother them much. But their down is water-absorbent, so if it should grow suddenly warm and then rain, their down would get drenched, hold the water in, and the penguin could become chilled to its skin and die.
A penguin’s sex organs are internal, so it’s difficult to know if it’s male or female until it mates. One staff woman was attempting to tell gender difference from the pattern of calls, which she confirmed by measuring hormones in the feces. Another scientist was trying to tell gender from the remains of feces in the shells. Brown-white-left gently probed into my hand, up my sleeve, into my hair, nestling, groping, as it whistle-chirped its own distinctive call. I thought brown-white-left was male, but I had no way of knowing. While I went about my chores, he followed me with his eyes, making little chirps and whistles, and I chattered back, regularly pausing to hug him. Then the obvious dawned on me. In the almost-deafening clamor of Penguin Quarantine, the only individual penguin’s voice I recognized was brown-white-left’s; he recognized my voice. Imprinting, they call it. The image that flashed to mind was a film I once saw of Konrad Lorenz up to his neck in a lake, with a flock of baby geese following him as he swam. I put the smelt I was holding back into the pail, wiped my hands, and returned to the F-1 crib yet again. Wrapping an arm around brown-white-left, I pulled him close, and he nuzzled deep into my collar, found my warm neck, and whistled quietly. Outside a small glass window, where Sea World’s visitors stand and watch the nursery doings, rows of people sighed in unison. Although I couldn’t hear them, I saw a crowd of human mouths rounding to a sound like “Awww.”
Penguins are the most anthropomorphic of all animals. Everyone identifies with them. Nor had I ever been with an animal that brought out such a mothering instinct. Why do we have such strong responses to penguins? First, they stand straight and walk upright like humans, so we see them as little humanoids—a convention of headwaiters, ten thousand nuns, plump babies wearing snowsuits. On land, they have a comical waddling walk, which is similar to a human toddler’s. Free of terrestrial predators, they are very curious about humans and tend to walk right up to you. When you look down, you find an affectionate creature standing tall and straight as a young child, perhaps offering you its flipper the way we shake hands. Adult penguins are easy to anthropomorphize, too, because they sometimes seem so much a caricature of human life. They like company but also bicker with their neighbors; they give their mate gifts of pretty stones but also quarrel from time to time, have affairs, and divorce and remarry; they’re affectionate, attentive parents and share the child rearing; they live in colonies that function like cities; they’re plagued by adolescent gangs; they’re forever waddling around at high speed, as if out on important errands. They are creatures of instinct, but so are we. Our instincts dwell under layers of inhibitions, social codes, bridled emotions, feats of mental dressage, and hand-me-down wisdom, but when it comes to the basics of hunger, sex, child rearing, and other obbligatos, they are as strong as any penguin’s, and that unites us with them in a small way. If someone were to design an adorable animal that acted enough like a human being to be endearing but was different enough also to be exotic, a penguin would do perfectly. When I was a girl, and home air-conditioning was rare, I used to look for a shop with a tiny penguin decal on its door, which meant that it was blissfully air-conditioned inside. Penguins adorn ice cream bars, greeting cards, calendars, wool, postage stamps, cigarettes, chocolate-covered mints, and many other attractive products. British pubs are sometimes named The Penguin, as is one of Batman’s archenemies. Gary Larson uses penguins as caricature humans in his enchantingly sick “Far Side” cartoons. Berke Breathed draws cartoon penguins, too. But probably the most famous are those adorning Penguin Books. In the mid-thirties, Allen Lane wanted to launch an ambitious paperback house, but he didn’t have a name for it. His secretary suggested Penguin; it captured for him just the right attitude of “dignified flippancy.” Small wonder, then, that during the Falklands war, one English town I know of collected money (or “had a whip-round,” as they put it) to help save the large population of penguins. The fate of the pilots, infantrymen, shepherds, and sheep, on the other hand, didn’t seem to concern them as much.
Avid bird-spotters know how easy it is to confuse birds, so many of which look alike. Indeed, most birds are LBJs, as birders call them—little brown jobs. Penguins, on the other hand, are uniquely identifiable, not just among birds but among all animals on earth. Everyone knows what a penguin looks like. Yet there are shocking misconceptions about penguins. For one thing, they don’t live at the South Pole. Not only is the South Pole about eight hundred miles from the closest body of water, it’s at an altitude of almost ten thousand feet. Nor do they live with Eskimos and polar bears, both of which are at the other side of the world, in the Arctic.
“Penguin,” you might say to a friend in a game of free association, and your friend is bound to answer “snow” or “ice” or “South Pole.” But only four species of penguins live on the Antarctic continent, and only two are restricted exclusively to the Antarctic. Most live in slightly balmier climates, on sub-Antarctic islands like South Georgia or the Falklands, or along the coast of South America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand; and one species even lives in the Galápagos, near the equator. No penguins live north of the equator, nor have they ever. The ocean currents aren’t favorable for carrying them that far north. And anyway, northern coasts wouldn’t be as welcoming a locale for them. True, their cousins the ostriches survive among lions, leopards, and other land predators because of their extraordinary speed, size, and strength. But penguins, out of water, aren’t such hot rods.
Penguins don’t have fur, even though the babies may feel minky-soft. Mammals have fur; penguins are birds, and they have feathers. Although they’re known as flightless birds—like ostriches, emus, kiwis, rheas, cassowaries, and the now-extinct moas and dodoes—they’re on the same branch of evolution as hummingbirds. According to the fossil record, both flying and flightless birds evolved from the same ancestor. It’s just that penguins adapted to their environment differently than did the songbirds. To escape a predator, a wren needs to fly away from a cat or a fox. But a penguin’s chief enemies are skillful oceanic predators like leopard seals and killer whales, and the bird needs to be agile in the water, not on land or in the air, which is why it’s so vulnerable to human hunters. The sky is almost irrelevant to its style of life. What’s more, penguins haven’t changed much in forty million years. Oddest of all, perhaps, penguins are dinosaurs. They’re not just descended from dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs. Once they were larger—standing over five feet tall and weighing around three hundred pounds—and not a few scientists have observed that they would have made great football players. The biggest penguin alive today, the emperor, is about four feet tall and weighs as much as a hundred pounds. In contrast, the smallest, the fairy, weighs only two and a half pounds and stands a mere twelve inches tall. People see films of penguins waddling across the ice, hear them referred to as flightless birds, and naturally assume that penguins can’t fly.
But penguins do indeed fly. They fly in water. Using flat, tapered wings that have a rounded leading edge, and flapping like any swift or lark, penguins fly through the water as they feed, or to escape predators. Although penguins may be hefty, in the ocean they’re essentially weightless. Their wings are strong and paddlelike, to power them through the dense water at speeds up to fifteen miles per hour. They use their short brushlike tails and webbed feet to steer. Magnificently aquatic, penguins arc out of the water like whales—called “porpoising”—to breathe as they swim. They don’t fill their lungs with air but take in just enough to keep the lungs from collapsing, and in fact breathe out rather than in before they reenter the water. When penguins dive, their pulse goes from one hundred beats a minute to twenty beats a minute, and because they take only one shallow breath, they don’t get the bends. They are streamlined like torpedoes; indeed, at one point the Navy studied their shape. The simple reason why penguins can’t fly in the air is that they have too much body weight for such short, narrow wings to support. At some point in their evolution, it became more important for them to have weight than wingspan, even though that meant they would lose the ability to fly. This may sound like a profound sacrifice, but in matters of natural selection it was so great an advantage that only flightless penguins have survived. After all, birds use flight to evade predators, search for their food, and migrate. But if those aren’t problems, or if there are attributes for greater survival value (a big body and fast running speed for the ostrich, for instance), then the ability to fly becomes irrelevant. Most of a penguin’s life is spent at sea, where it needs sea skills.
Photographs show penguins on ice floes or against a backdrop of towering Antarctic ice mountains, so people assume that penguins live on land. But some species spend as much as 75 percent of their lives in the water. Scientists only see them on land during their brief courting, mating, molting, and brooding season. The rest of the time they migrate, and may stay at sea for as long as five months at a stretch. This means that when on shore, they aren’t in their preferred element, the watery atmosphere they’re designed for. To us, they waddle and stumble like “animated laundry bags,” as penguin expert Olin Pettingill, Jr., dubbed them, and we laugh and assume that they’re just naturally clumsy beasts. But underwater they’re streamlined, agile, and fast. Almost everything we know about penguins comes from observing them during only one misleading phase of their life cycle—the land phase. They would find us lethargic and clumsy too, if they only saw us stumbling around in the dark. People think of penguins as slow movers. Though they can’t outrun a lion, penguins can skedaddle on land if they really need to. In powdery snow, they can outrun a human being. Their best trick is to fall onto their stomachs and toboggan, picking up speed as they career down an icy hill. To leap onto huge icebergs, they need timing, balance, and coordination. They would make grand tight-rope walkers.
Penguins are birds, and birds have hollow bones, right? Other birds do have hollow bones, making them light enough to fly through the air, but penguins do not. Penguins need to be buoyant in the water, but not too buoyant, or they wouldn’t be able to dive for krill and fish. It’s more important that they have some sort of ballast, so penguins have solid bones, like ours. Films often show penguins standing on an ice floe eyeing the ocean until one is “pushed” in as a “sacrificial victim” to test the waters for a hungry leopard seal. This, if true, would require more malevolent presence of mind than penguins have. Instead, what usually happens is that so many penguins are crowded on an ice floe that those near the edge get nudged off. When that occurs, the others plunge right in, since they’re very much creatures of the mob.
There is some confusion about how the penguin got its name. One story insists that the word comes from the Welsh pen gwyn, or “white head,” referring to the white spot on the head of the now-extinct great auk, a black-and-white flightless northern bird originally named penguin. Another story credits the Latin word pinguis, meaning fat, and refers to the penguin’s many layers of blubber. Yet another traces the word back to British seafaring days, when sailors supposedly called the birds pin-wings. The Argentinians call the penguin pajaro niño, “child bird.”
When my quarantine period was up, I sat quietly inside Sea World’s Penguin Encounter, a large, public, glassed-in environment that was as much a display as a home for the many species of penguins that lived there. Nesting, mating, swimming in a small, deep pool, they led a reasonably normal life. They did not seem to mind the sudden flashes of light that now and then glittered like distant supernovas. Although their world was brightly lit, moving walkways just beyond the glass window carried thousands of zoo visitors past in relative darkness. I could see their ghostly outlines from the corner where I was seated on shaved ice. I leaned against a rock ledge while one penguin tried to eat my shoelace and another climbed up into my lap. Closed-circuit video cameras jutted out from the ceiling to monitor the penguins’ activities. An adult king penguin dove into the pool and moments later sprang out the other side. It was tempting to think of these display penguins as displaced creatures, but they knew nothing of their true homes so many latitudes away. What must their lives be like in the wild? To seek an answer to that question is to begin what Apsley Cherry-Garrard in 1922 called “the worst journey in the world.” A member of Scott’s final expedition, he survived to write a memoir recalling his long, courageous trek across the Antarctic in 1911. Though it was winter, Cherry-Garrard and two colleagues went by sled 130 miles across the continent on an extremely hazardous trip from Scott’s base camp to Cape Crozier. The trip took five weeks in the polar night, just to obtain a few emperor-penguin eggs. They thought emperors were very primitive birds, and they needed to study some embryos. The temperature plunged to –77° F., and the winds howled at well over a hundred miles an hour, yet they survived. Later, two of the men died with Scott on his tragic bid for the South Pole, and Cherry-Garrard returned to write about the Cape Crozier crossing in the sensitive classic The Worst Journey in the World, whose title became synonymous with trekking to Antarctica. Now, one can sleep at night on a luxury cruise ship, where a chef serves gourmet meals, and there are lecture halls and movies, but the trip is still arduous.
One cold bright Sunday in January 1989, I flew fifteen hours to Santiago, Chile, where I stayed overnight at a hotel. The next day two more flights carried me to Puerto Williams, a bleak Argentinian outpost that included barracks for the military personnel stationed there, a museum, and one out-of-place-looking bowling alley. There I boarded the World Discoverer, a German-owned cruise ship that travels the world with lecturers, naturalists, tourists, and a large crew, mainly Filipinos and Germans. On the previous year’s trip, the weather had been so rough in Drake Passage that many passengers went to their cabins, tied themselves into their beds with belts provided for that purpose, and stayed there for two days. This year, I hoped the seas would be calmer, but I had brought seven kinds of anti-seasickness medication in case. When Shackleton, the explorer, made the trip early in the century, he used sled dogs and wooden ships. What would he have made of a cruise ship complete with a library, laundry, infirmary, sauna, gym, and Art Deco dining room? In addition to 129 tourists from all over the world, there were also, as usual, scientists hitching a ride (Frank Todd had been on the previous sailing, coming aboard from a British Navy vessel, where he had been doing research). Although this may sound like a large pilgrimage to the South Pole, it’s really small. All such trips are.
You see, on any Saturday or Sunday afternoon in the fall, there are more people in a single college football stadium than have ever been to the Antarctic in all of history. It is a distant, largely unknown world, and its problems seem remote. Yet it, and its animal life, fascinates people. Sea World in San Diego sells hundreds of books about penguins every month. The Penguin Encounters at the four Sea Worlds combined draw ten million people a year. One day soon, we may need to decide the fate of the largest desert on Earth, one of the last wildernesses, even though most of us have never seen it and will never see it in our lifetime. We will be responsible for deciding the fate of its penguins, seals, birds, and other creatures. The Antarctic Treaty outlaws such acts of environmental sabotage as nuclear-bomb tests and the harboring of weapons systems and insists that the continent “shall continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes.” But perhaps the most important thing it does is to protect the future of people who live as far away as Phoenix or Beijing. The Antarctic ice cap contains 68 percent of all the fresh water on earth, and we may one day need it.
As much as anything, the Antarctic’s problems are political. The treaty has been in effect for almost thirty years, and twelve nations were the original signers. Since then, twenty-six countries have joined, eight as voting members. Remaining essentially intact for the entire time that it has been in effect, the treaty has to some extent protected the Antarctic from exploitation. That doesn’t mean, though, that science has been compromised or that the Antarctic is a self-protected, hands-off kind of a place. But the treaty has been a good mechanism for keeping the status quo, as much as possible, within the many political climates of the world. One of the reasons the treaty was successful is because two sensitive issues weren’t really dealt with: mineral exploitation (such as gold, copper, silver, beryl, iron, zinc, graphite, coal, and oil) and fishing rights on the high seas (including whales, seals, penguins, and krill). With the treaty up for review, those two issues still haven’t been resolved, and may not be resolveable. Many scientists would like the treaty to be extended because those key issues can’t be sorted out. Greenpeace would like the Antarctic declared a global park (an idea implied by the treaty itself). This is not as outlandish as it sounds. In 1990, the Planetary Society’s magazine, The Planetary Report, solicited its readers’ opinions on passing a law to protect all of Mars and any other planet we explore in the coming decades, to declare each one a planetary park, so that no nation could exploit its resources or ruin its environment. Although Antarctic scientists from different lands get on well together, visit one another’s outposts, go to one another’s parties, and generally wish each other well in the name of science and the mutually stranded, their countries constantly bicker. A number of countries claim the same prime pieces of the peninsula. If you look at a map of Argentina, it includes the Antarctic. A map of Chile includes the same Antarctic territory. The British claim the territory, too. The United Nations also wants control of it, on behalf of all peoples. But many scientists think that wouldn’t work, either. After all, they argue, the UN has not been able to solve the problems of the rest of the world. Why give it Antarctica?
One complication is getting there in the first place. Only a handful of C-130 airplanes operate in and out of the Antarctic. If a number break down, traffic stops and everyone’s marooned. Todd one time found himself in just that predicament, and he quickly discovered the frontier camaraderie among the multinational researchers. “So there we were,” he had told me at Sea World, “an American team, dicking around in Chile, trying to figure out what to do. We got on board the World Discoverer, a German ship chartered by Americans, were taken to the Antarctic, and had our cargo offloaded by Indonesians and Filipinos into a Russian LCM steered by East Germans to a Chilean base, then we were flown by the Chileans to an Argentine refugio and had our communications to the States sent via the Chinese at the Chinese station, and the Brazilian Air Force brought us and our eggs out at the end of our stay. There’s no place else in the world where you can do that.”
But such political concerns drifted into the suburbs of our minds in Puerto Williams when we gathered in the ship’s large lounge to meet the lecturers and one another and begin talking about penguins, which some of us had come from as far away as Switzerland, Germany, and South Africa to see. Two large groups, led by expert birders Brett Whitney and Bob Ridgely, had also come to pursue exotic seabirds. Some of these birders had traveled together before, on jaunts to Ecuador, the South Pacific, New Guinea, the Galápagos, and other locales. They were easy to spot in a crowd, wearing their heavy stigmata—a pair of Zeiss 10x40B binding binoculars (“armored” and with “close focus” features) draped down the chest, with the lens cap looking like a rounded black bow tie that had slipped to the back of the neck. They had two long lists of birds they hoped to spot, with boxes in which to check off each sighting, or to just write an H if they only heard the call of the bird. (The rules of bird-spotting are as mazey as international law.) That night, on the ledge of the journey, though all of us were excited, the birders had begun rubbing their collective mania together like high-quality flints. Before going to bed, they met with their leaders to run down their checklists and get ready for the morning’s landing at Cape Horn, right at the tailbone of South America. The ocean currents and winds at Cape Horn are legendary for their ferocity. People assume the name comes from the shape of the 1,300-foot peak on the south side of the island, which in rough weather seems to impale the sky. But it was named by Dutch navigators in 1616, after the Dutch town of Hoorn, and though only five miles square, it has come to symbolize a breakaway from the known world and civilization. Like a last handhold, Cape Horn reaches into the southern ocean, and beyond it floats Antarctica.
At five o’clock on a cool, damp morning, I woke in a narrow bed to many movements at once: From the knees down, my legs felt as if they were dropping down an elevator shaft, my torso shimmied twice, and my chest rolled like a bag full of peaches. For a few moments, I drifted into sleep, then woke to someone sitting down on the bed beside me. When I opened my eyes, no one was there. When I closed them, someone sat down beside me again. Opened them, no one was there. Plunging and swaying, the ship surged through the waves, hitting them crosswise, and the motion set my stomach revolving. Like Stephano in The Tempest, I wanted to cry: “Prithee do not turn me about—my stomach is not constant.” Finally, to keep from throwing up, I tried to picture the motion that was seizing me, a motion familiar in my joints and in my nervous system: that of cantering on a fresh, high-spirited horse with a tantrum lying just under his surface. In my mind’s eye, I was cantering bareback on a black Arabian stallion on a black sand volcanic beach. The air was hot and salty and the sunstruck waves poured like liquid glass onto the beach. Meanwhile the rocking and swaying was a half ton of snort and lather flexing its muscles beneath me, full of outbreak and alarm, its graceful power held in check by my small human hands. In time, my stomach settled. The alarm clock rang, and holding on to the wall, I stood up and looked out through a porthole onto a mountainous landscape, alien, barren, and cold.
A six-bell melody sounded over the intercom, and then the voice of the expedition leader told us that it would be a “wet landing” and to wear full gear, which included waterproof pants, knee-high boots, a bright-red hooded parka, waterproof gloves, a scarf and hat, a life vest, and a rucksack to hold our cameras, binoculars, and other supplies. Breakfast was to come later, when we returned from the morning’s trek. A hundred and twenty-nine people lined up on B deck to turn 129 numbered tags hanging on a board to the red side to signal to the crew that they were going on land (returning, they would flip them to the black side, so that everyone would be accounted for before the ship sailed on), and stepped one by one into the waiting Zodiacs. The tag system worked. The previous year, a traveler on shore who had stumbled, hit his head, and passed out was discovered hours later by a search party after his tag was found unturned. The Zodiacs carried us to a sheltered bay to the east side of the island, where large ocean-smoothed stones and seeweed made up the beach, and our naturalist guides waited at the bottom of a steep staircase. We gathered in groups around Peter Harrison, birder; Bernard Stonehouse, a world authority on penguins, whose wife, Sally, was with him; Commander Angus Erskine, retired British naval officer and Arctic and Antarctic explorer; Richard Rowlett, specialist in marine mammals, who had just spent six years on a Russian whaling ship; and Robert Ridgely, an ornithologist from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Then we began the climb up 150 feet of steep, slippery wooden steps to the top of the hill, which opened out onto a windswept field of dense tussock grass, rocky outcroppings, a small chapel, and a Chilean weather station.
“Up the stairs and turn left,” Erskine instructed us matter-of-factly. “Turn right, and you’ll be in a minefield.” Laughter from the climbers. “No,” he insisted in a well-tempered English accent. “It is a real minefield.” It was not difficult to picture Erskine in command of a 2,500-ton destroyer, as he had been in the Royal Navy for many years. Tall, sandy-haired, bearded, he was the epitome of the British officer—someone who maintains good posture even in bad terrain.
At the top of the stairs, thick tussocks of poa grass sprawled toward the distant spire of Cape Horn. Harrison was dressed in a white sweater with a pattern of black dashes stitched through it, which looked like the dappled plumage of a bird. Slender, with a blondish beard and mustache, he looked a bit avian himself as he stopped suddenly, lifted his binoculars to his eyes, and crept forward. “Pshhh, pshhh, pshhh,” he stage-whispered. He had heard the call of the thorn-tailed rayadito, a little white-throated, russet-eye-browed, brown-backed bird with a children’s-toy squeak for a call, and he was hoping to flush it from its cover. A small flutter in the brush. “A thorn-tailed rayadito!” He extended one arm, pointed, followed the bird with his hand. Devout birders lifted their cameras and binoculars to their eyes.
“Oh, I’ve seen one of those,” one woman said wearily, and continued climbing the winding staircase toward the summit.
“They often go around in small family parties,” Harrison continued excitedly—“Not there!” He interrupted himself to warn a wayward birder, who was drifting into a field to the right. “That’s a minefield!” She laughed. Erskine had told her the same thing. What a card these lecturers were. “No, that’s a real minefield,” Harrison said, letting his binoculars fall to his hand for a moment while he followed her movements. By that time Erskine had reached the top as well and, putting a hand gently on her shoulder, explained: “The Chileans always feared Argentinian invasion, so they put a machine-gun nest here, a helicopter pad”—he pointed to a ring of white stones—“and all sorts of land mines, some of which are still unexploded.” Slightly addled, the woman turned crisply and hurried left, over bogs of spongy peat mixed with penguin guano, through fields of poa grass as impenetrable as muscle. An oven bird sang sweetly. On a distant promontory, a twenty-five-foot-high red-and-white lighthouse marked the tip of Cape Horn. Then a raucous braying, as from donkeys, began, and we looked toward a cliff, where two Magellanic penguins popped up beside their nest. With c ncentrie circles of black and white on their cheeks, pink splotches around their eyes, and a smile-shaped pink stripe below their bills, they looked impish. Almost immediately they disappeared. It was our first sighting of wild penguins, and we were not expecting to find them here, such an arduous climb above the sea. To nest where the drainage is good and their eggs will be safe from flood, Magellanics may climb as much as nine hundred feet. Another pair popped up and brayed from another clump of grass, flashing pink eye masks. We did not expect them to bray like jackasses. Turning a slow circle, I scanned the poa grass. They popped up like targets in a shooting gallery, watched us for a while, then disappeared into their burrows. Far down the hill, along a crescent-shaped beach, stood hundreds more penguins, which were getting ready to swim out to sea to feed, or had just returned with full bellies. Some made long, honking mating calls, others short, rapid “rallying calls,” just to let the world know they were Magellanics. The wind had risen to forty miles an hour, and the cold air started to creep into my clothes. A striated caracara, a brown-and-gold bird of prey related to the falcon, slipped sideways across the sky, its huge wings carrying it like a solar sail. Between the quicksandlike mix of mud and guano and the coarse poa grass, there was only one route to travel: along the penguin pathways, which led in a hard-to-see labyrinth across the hillside and down to the sea. At the base of many of the grass-hut-size tussocks, among clusters of veronica, were holes that the penguins had dug as nests.
“For those of you who haven’t ticked off a Chilean skua yet,” Bob Ridgely said, “there are two of them flying low over that ridge.” The birders turned their heads in unison.
“Oh, what’s this, then?” Stonehouse said. Scuttling through the brush was a baby Magellanic penguin, and in a moment he and Harrison had grabbed it, pinning its wings and holding it gently but securely. It had a black face, with tufts of brown at the neck and a pinkish splotch at each eye. “This is a juvenile penguin whose parents have deserted it,” Stonehouse said, “making its way down to the ocean. When it gets there, it’s going to stand on the beach for a few days and then will go to sea. If it has enough fat, it will make it. All around here you’ll find burrows where the chicks were raised. Unlike the Antarctic penguins, which hatch out onto stones or onto the feet of their parents, these penguins are safe underground. Some animals become able-bodied and alert soon after they hatch, so that they can flee a predator. But these penguins don’t have to hatch out feathered and alert. They hatch out blind and quite helpless and are covered in a fine layer of pale grayish down.” When they put the chick back in the grass, it flopped onto its belly and tobogganed downhill toward the beach part of the rookery. The term rookery first referred to a group of rooks, which are also colonial birds. Then the term was carried over to crows and, finally, to other collections of breeding birds, even to some mammals, like fur seals. And penguins are supremely colonial, or social, making rookeries that can sprawl for hundreds of acres. Living together means they can unite against predators, protect their young, and migrate together.
As the others hurried across a field in pursuit of a rare plumbeous rail, Stonehouse and I moseyed among the tussocks of deep, rich, bent-over poa grass. Tall and slender, with his blue rucksack and his purple-and-pale-blue college scarf, he looked for the moment like the Cambridge don he was. And when he spoke, you could detect the Cambridge “r” that Jacob Bronowski introduced to many American viewers on PBS. In fact, Bronowski lodged in the house when Stonehouse was just a boy and was the first to encourage his smart, inquiring young mind. He smiled, pulled aside the tussock grass, and revealed a round burrow. “Smell,” he said, and I knelt in the sod and inhaled the sweet oily saltiness of penguin. Suddenly, a beak jutted out of the darkness and swept swiftly back and forth. We laughed. The burrow’s resident was at home and dueling with its sharp bill, at the ready for intruders.
“How on earth do they find their way from the beach to their nest through all this vegetation?” I asked. Only coal miners and spelunkers faced trickier tunnels.
“We don’t know that for sure. Penguin navigation is a mysterious thing. It could be magnetic, they might be using the sun, or they could be memorizing the details of their neighborhood and finding their way back by signposts alone.”
Almost everything we know about penguins is based on the slender period of time, during breeding season, that they spend on shore; and their shore life is a compromised one, since they’re designed for the sea. Many questions remain. What do they do when we don’t see them? What happens to them during the winter, I wondered, when they live at sea, constantly swimming and porpoising for air? Where do they feed? In the summer, the waters are murky and full of kelp and sediment, but in the winter the water grows lucid and clear. Most adult penguins die at sea, and winter must be a time of considerable hazard for them. Although they can see their food better, leopard seals can see them better. Do the various colonies stay together, or do they scatter throughout the ice packs? Penguins are like icebergs—a scintillating mystery, most of which is hidden from view.
Withdrawing carefully, and then sinking and stumbling through the compost of peat, guano, and lichen, we made our way back up the hill to a small log cabin chapel. Inside, a wooden altar sat on two tree stumps, and a vase holding a dry brown stalk of evergreen trimmed with tinsel and one pinecone reminded us that Christmas mass had been celebrated here not very long before. A print of the Virgen del Carmen, Reina de Chile, adorned the wall. She was a beautiful teenage girl holding a child whose head and arms were slightly out of proportion, like a dwarf’s. In another corner, a statue of the Virgin and Child sat on another tree stump. On the altar ran the words: “Madre de todos / Estrella del Mar, ruega por nosotros.” As blustery winds whistled through the cracks in the log chapel, it seemed a good place to send one’s prayers to heaven: at the windswept edge of the known world, with penguins popping up from minefields. Outside again, we pressed our collars tight against the cold and began the slippery trek down to the beach, where the Zodiacs waited to ferry us, hungry and tired, back to the ship.
After breakfast, I crawled into bed and slept. The boat started up, and soon it began plunging again. Camera, binoculars, books, watch, papers all skidded across the desk and shelves and hit the floor one at a time. The waves began to crash against the boat with such fury that when they struck the portholes, they exploded like cannonfire. All those sea movies with their relentless creaking and swaying were right. The boat creaked like a new shoe. Lying in bed, bolstered by a pillow at each side so I didn’t roll out, I looked hard at the cabin walls, trying to grip them with my eyes. Their cream-colored ersatz marbling was supposed to look randomly done with a plasterer’s knife, but a horse’s head, the face of a man with a mustache, and three penguins walking single file was repeated. (In his notebooks, Leonardo tells his students to stare at the cracks in a marble wall until they see a world reveal itself, and centuries later, Alain Robbe-Grillet would begin his novel Project for a Revolution in New York in a similar way.) When we were summoned to lifeboat drill, I staggered upstairs with the others, clinging to the handrails. Tucked between most of the railings and the wall were seasickness bags. Some people carried their own. It was the sole topic of conversation as we waited for drill. I began a bout of yawning I couldn’t explain, my gorge began to rise, and I swallowed it back down. When the drill ended, everyone rushed back down to their cabins. But on the way, I staggered to the stern of the boat and there found a scene right out of storybooks, as albatrosses, sooty shearwaters, and white-chinned petrels slid across the keel of the boat, banking, wheeling, stalling, climbing, touching their wingtips to the whitecaps, rushing low through the spray, skidding, diving, and soaring.
At twelve-thirty, lunch was announced over the intercom, and also the news that the seas were too rough for the afternoon’s landing; wild and rollicking, they were rearing up higher than the sides of the ship. A calm, well-tempered voice on the intercom announced that because of the “swell,” the afternoon’s lectures had been postponed. So, too, the captain’s welcome cocktail party and dinner. A stewardess stopped by with a plateful of crackers and a cup of tea. Even she was feeling seasick. If I chewed the saltines very slowly, I discovered they would stay down. They reminded me of the biscuits the explorers in the Antarctic’s “heroic age” relied on as a staple of their diet, along with pemmican, sugar, tea, and cocoa. Hardship did not stop the early explorers; indeed, it seems to have been a lure. As notorious as Drake Passage was, we were actually experiencing it in one of its calmer moods. Most people kept to their cabins and missed meals; some bundled up in parkas and blankets and sat out on the deck in chairs. Stalwart birders and those with enviable sea legs spent the crossing in the observation bridge, binoculars pressed against their eyes like the fists of sleepy children. We were an odd lot of travelers. There were doctors of every denomination, lawyers, anthropologists, professors, an assistant secretary of state (in the Carter administration), a venture capitalist, a psychologist, a painter, professional photographers, middle-income couples who had saved for years to make the trip, and wealthy tourists, one of whom, when I asked what she did in Marin County, had the candor to reply, “Oh, I don’t have to do anything.” The average age was between sixty and seventy, and many on board were retired.
On the observation bridge, between bird-spottings, a radiologist and a physicist discussed subatomic theory, string theory, and the Michelson-Morley experiment. “Einstein woke up the physicists from their dogmatic slumber,” the radiologist said.
“Storm petrel,” the physicist advised, and both followed with binoculars as it fell-swooped and then skidded out of sight. “I think Bertrand Russell said if he had to do it over again he’d be a physicist,” the physicist continued. “There comes that moment of yearning to tie your tent to the pegs of existence.” The other man nodded. They were far from the mirage oasis of academic life or the lucrative caravansary of medicine. But existence was pegged out plainly, in the harsh seas luxuriant with krill and the birds that had migrated as far as ten thousand miles from the Arctic to feed on such abundance.
By early morning we had reached the Antarctic Convergence, a wedding of the freezing Antarctic Sea and the warmer waters of the north, which often reveals itself as a line of foam with fog and mist and large flocks of seabirds moving in and out across its five-mile width. In our wake flew Wilson’s storm petrels, which tap-danced on top of the waves, black-and-white-splotched pintados, tiny black-bellied storm petrels, Antarctic prions, sieving the surface for food, the stubby-winged diving petrels, and huge wandering albatrosses that seemed not to flap at all but to carry chunks of the sky on their wings. Minke, humpback, and southern bottle-nosed whales crossed our path from time to time, as did hourglass dolphins. We scouted the water keenly for penguins, which travel many miles to feed, but saw none. The waves continued to rear up on either side of the boat, cup us in thick green hands, and hurl us forward into another pair of waiting hands, which hurled us forward yet again. Night fell late and suddenly, without the usual pastel preamble of twilight.
At first light, on calmer seas, I opened the two porthole covers like a second pair of eyes and looked out onto Antarctica for the first time. White upon white with white borders was all I expected to see; instead, colossal icebergs of palest blue and mint-green floated across the vista. Beyond them, long chalky cliffs stretched out of view. Throwing on a parka, I raced upstairs to the deck and looked all around. As far as I could see in any direction, icebergs meandered against a backdrop of tall, crumbly Antarctic glaciers, which were still pure and unexplored. Human feet had not touched the glaciers I saw; nor had many pairs of eyes beheld them. In many ways, the Antarctic is a world of suspended animation. Suspended between outer space and the fertile continents. Suspended in time—without a local civilization to make history. Civilization has been brought to it; it has never sustained any of its own. It sits suspended in a hanging nest of world politics. When things die in the Antarctic, they decay slowly. What has been is still there and will always be, unless we interfere. Interfere is such a simple word for what is happening: the ozone hole, the greenhouse effect, disputes over territory, pollution, mining. Who discovered Antarctica we may never know. We remember the Shackletons and the Scotts, but it was the whalers and sealers who opened up the Antarctic, not the explorers. Because the whalers and sealers didn’t talk much about their good hunting grounds, they have sifted between the seams of history.
Soon we dropped anchor at Harmony Cove, Nelson Island, in the South Shetland Islands, whose ice cliffs are layered with volcanic ash from the Deception Island eruption of 1970. Piling into the Zodiacs, we dashed toward a cobble beach, where one of the crew, who had gone ashore early, had teased the other Zodiac drivers by spelling out LANDING in stones against the snow. A blue odalisque of ice floated offshore. Hundred-foot white glacial cliffs stood next to huge rooms of pure aquamarine ice. Ah-hah! A small welcoming party of gentoo penguins, ashore to feed their waiting chicks, waddled close to look us over. One penguin tilted its head one way, then the other, as it stared at me. This made the bird look like an art dealer, quietly thinking and appraising. Penguins don’t have binocular vision as humans do, so they turn one eye to an object, then the other, to see it. Although they can see well underwater, they don’t need long vision when they’re on land. The last time I saw a look quite like that gentoo’s was in the Penguin House at the Central Park Zoo. There, in a shower of artificial Antarctic light, in a display created by a theatrical-lighting designer, gentoos and chinstraps had eyed the crowd of people watching them—including some of the homeless of Manhattan, who used the Penguin House as a favorite warming-up spot.
According to one saying, “There are two kinds of penguins in the Antarctic, the white ones coming toward you, and the black ones going away from you.” All penguins are essentially black and white on their bodies, a feature known as countershading. Their white bellies and chins blend in with the shimmery light filtering through the water, so they’re less likely to be spotted from below when they’re in the ocean. That makes hunting fish easier, as well as escaping leopard seals. Their black backs also make them less visible from above as they fly through the murky waters. To the krill, the white belly of the penguin looks like a pale orb, harmless as the sky. To the leopard seal, the black back of the penguin looks like a shadow on the ocean bottom, unpalatable. Researchers found that if they marked penguins with aluminum bands, the tags flashed and leopard seals could spot them too easily. A lot of their study birds were killed, and they switched to black tags. Another advantage of being black and white: If they’re too hot, they can turn their white parts to the sun and reflect heat; if too cold, they can turn their black parts to the sun and absorb heat. Because most of a penguin’s body is below water, it’s the head that has developed so many interesting designs and colors. A field guide to penguins would only need to show you the heads. Adélie penguins (named after Adélie Land, a stretch of Antarctic coast below Australia that was itself named after Adélie Dumont d’Urville, the wife of the nineteenth-century French explorer Jules-Sébastian-César Dumont d’Urville, who first sighted it; among Captain d’Urville’s other accomplishments was sending the Venus de Milo to the Louvre) have black heads, with chalk-white eye rings. They are the little men in the tuxedo suits we see in cartoons. Rock-hoppers have lively red eyes, long yellow and black head feathers resembling a crewcut that’s been allowed to grow out, and thick yellow satanic eyebrows that slant up and away from their eyes, giving their face an expression that says, I dare you! Chinstraps get their name from the helmet of black feathers that seems to be attached by a thin black “strap” across their white throats. Their amber eyes, outlined in thick black, look Egyptian, like a hieroglyph for some as-yet-undecipherable verb. Emperors have black heads, a tawny stripe on the bill, and a bib of egg-yolk yellow around their neck and cheeks. The most flamboyant of all, king penguins display a large, velvety-orange comma on each cheek, as if always in the act of being quoted about something. A throbbing orange at their neck melts into radiant yellow. And, on either side of their bills, a comet of apricot or lavender flies toward their mouth. Fairy penguins are tiny and blue-headed. Each of the seventeen different species of penguins, though essentially black-and-white, differs from all others in head pattern.
On shore, of course, a mass of penguins with predominantly black-and-white bodies looks a bit like linoleum in a cheap diner. Human beings tend to be obsessed with black-and-white animals, like killer whales, giant pandas, and penguins. “We live in a world of grays, could be’s, ambiguities,” Frank Todd once observed. “Maybe it’s just nice to see something that’s cut-and-dried. It’s black-and-white. It’s there, and that’s the way it is.”
Gentoos feed their chicks every eighteen to twenty-four hours, and the adults that had just arrived were fat-bellied, crammed with fish and krill. Native to the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic, the gentoos were white-breasted and black-backed like all penguins, but they had a white bonnet on their heads. Though quiet and friendly, they drifted just out of reach. Along with Adélies and chinstraps, the gentoos belong to the genus Pygoscelis (“brush-tailed”), because of their short, paintbrush-shaped tail, and they are shy penguins, whose chicks grow slowly, staying close to a parent’s warm body for weeks after hatching. The gentle gentoos are docile and may not have to pair-bond as vigorously as other penguins; otherwise they would need to declare their territory and mate more stridently and become more aggressive about intruders. The name gentoo is from the deceit of a British Museum man, who received a gentoo skin from an Antarctic explorer, thought it was a new species of bird, and decided to hide the information for a while. Later, he went off to Papua New Guinea, and when he returned, he described the bird as if it were one of the local species, naming it after the Gentoo, a religious sect on Papua New Guinea.
As we straggled along the shore toward granite outcroppings where penguins nest, two large brown birds began forays, dive-bombing. This was our first close encounter with the skua, nemesis of the baby penguin, and I held an arm above my head because, like lightning, skuas strike at the highest spot. They can pick an animal’s eyes out before it knows what has happened. Hawklike, cunning, and bold, they are the ace predators of sick, young, or abandoned penguins. Some claim that skuas divide up a penguin colony into thousand-pair lots and that if you want a quick population estimate of a penguin colony, count the skuas and multiply by two thousand. A skua will carefully monitor a rookery, find a deserted chick, knock the bird senseless on the back of the head to kill it, then consume almost every scrap. When it devours an adult, it eats the viscera first, turning the carcass inside out like a sleeve, leaving only the head, skin, and bones. A big skua landed in front of us, spread its wings, and noisily proclaimed its territory. Then we saw why it was so anxious: A fluffy skua chick, head tucked into its shoulders, scurried away in the other direction and crouched. Another skua arrived, and both parents tried to draw our attention away. A little farther on, we found a small rookery of chinstraps, one with its flipper out straight, as if it were signaling a left turn; all looking like a gathering of crosswalk guards. Another was lying on its stomach and turned the soles of its feet up to cool off. Moving its flippers, it revealed an underside that had gone pink in the penguin equivalent of a blush. It was a warm day for them in Antarctica. A group of gentoo penguins ambled by, going anywhere, going nowhere. Penguins are born followers. If one begins to move with purpose, the others fall in behind it.
“Those poor penguins, living in this awful cold!” one woman lamented in a Southern drawl as she pulled her red parka tight around her neck and dragged a knitted cap down almost over her eyes. In fact, penguins rarely mind the cold. Quite the opposite. More often, they overheat. Like mammals, penguins are warm-blooded, which means that they’re able to make their own heat and carry it with them wherever they go, instead of taking on the temperature of their environment. This allows them to migrate and to live in otherwise inhospitable regions of the earth. Of course, keeping warm can become something of a problem in the Antarctic. Penguins have evolved thick layers of blubber, which their bodies make from krill and plantonic oils, and because blubber conducts heat poorly, a layer of it below the skin acts as an excellent insulator. It is also a place to store fuel for the long, cold breeding season. The farther south you go, the bigger the penguins get, since big animals find it easier to stay warm. About one third of the weight of the emperor penguin, which lives in the coldest regions, is blubber. In addition, as anyone who skis or spends much time outdoors in the winter knows, air makes one of the best insulators. Travelers to the Antarctic are advised to dress in many layers of clothing with plenty of air in between them. Penguins do that with tightly overlapping feathers, which don’t ruffle very easily and, as a result, trap a layer of warm air against the skin. Also, each feather develops a fluffy down at the base of its shaft, and that downy layer adds even more insulation. Penguins are watertight and airtight and thought to have more feathers than any other bird. The feathers are shiny, long, and curved, arranged like carefully laid roof shingles. Dipping into the oil gland at the base of the tail, a penguin spreads a layer of oil on the feathers to keep them slick and tight. Of course, feathers do get tattered after a year or so, and then the bird must molt, to slough off the old feathers and grow new ones. If it molted gradually, it wouldn’t be waterproof any longer, so it goes through all the steps of molting at the same time, a process that takes about thirty days. New feathers grow in underneath the ones that are molting and push the old ones out. It makes the penguin look scruffy and slightly crazed, as if it were ripping its feathers out in some avian delirium. What is worse, since they’re not waterproof while they’re molting, they can’t go hunting food in the ocean. Fasting is what it’s called by scientists, although that word suggests choice on the part of the penguin, which loses about 30 percent of its body weight and is bound to be hungry and is not exactly a volunteer.
But heat is a problem. There are few things as ridiculous as a penguin suffering the equivalent of heat stroke in the middle of the coldest place on earth. All around the rookery, overheated penguins resort to what look like vaudeville moves: Ruffling their feathers, they release some of the hot insulating air next to the skin. They hold one arm out, as if parking a 747, then they pirouette and signal a turn in the other direction. They flush pink under the wings, where capillaries swell with blood. Baby penguins like to lie down on their bellies and stick their feet up behind them, so that they can lose heat through the soles of their feet. They radiate heat through the few featherless zones on their bodies (usually around the eyes, flippers, and feet). A large adult suddenly ruffles up all over and extends its flippers at the same time, as if someone had scraped a fingernail across a blackboard.
The cold, on the other hand, isn’t really a problem. If the temperature drops too low (around 15° F. with a strong wind), thousands of birds will huddle together to stay warm in what the French researchers call tortues (turtles). Using one another for insulation, they don’t burn up their fat stores quickly. Huddling birds lose only half as much weight as birds braving the winds solo, because only a small portion of their bodies are exposed to the wind. It is akin to the protection apartment dwellers get, surrounded by apartments on either side that act as insulation.
“Come and look at this krill poop,” Harrison said, bending down to consider some guano. “It’s not very fresh. See those black spots in it?” He held up a handful and smudged it between his fingers. “That’s the eyes of krill, which are indigestible, like tomato seeds to us. When you see the ground stained red like this, it’s probably a chinstrap or an Adélie rookery rather than a gentoo, because the chinstraps eat krill and poop red. White poop comes from a diet of fish or squid. And green poop means they’re not eating at all; what you’re seeing is bile.” Across the hillside and around the large slabs of rock, the ground was stained pink. Even if the rookery had been deserted, we could tell chinstraps or Adélies lived there. Most of the zoologists I know are, by necessity, coprophiles. A living system leaves its imprint on what passes through it. So I’m no longer surprised to find a naturalist sifting through bat, alligator, or penguin excrement. Some even study petrified dinosaur excrement, or coprolites, as they’re called.
Beyond the rookery, molting elephant seals snoozed on the shore like overgrown salamis. They rolled around the sand together and against each other, to rub off the old fur, which wears out and has to be replaced each year. Pieces of molted fur and skin littered the beach. One often finds elephant seals with penguins, lying on the beach like so many old cast-off horsehair couches. It takes seven or eight years for the long nose of the bulls to develop. These pug-nosed ones were young males, which would grow larger, although they were already around twelve feet long and weighed about three thousand pounds. A gang of penguins strolled among them, seemingly without care. One in the center scratched his neck with a five-clawed flipper. Sluggish as they may look, elephant seals can dive to more than three thousand feet to feed on squid and fish.
On a rise, three fur seals sat up and stared aggressively as we passed. If they wanted to, they could gallop across the sand at great speed, tucking their pelvic girdles and undulating like fast worms. Fur seals will attack human beings. The previous year, a fur seal had grabbed a lecturer as he was getting into a Zodiac and punctured his lung. The man needed thirty-six stitches, and it took many months for the wounds to heal, since, to add to their armament, fur seals have an enzyme in their mucus that keeps their bites from healing properly. “I hate these,” one of the guides said under his breath. “I have nothing whatsoever against fur-seal coats. I tell you, I’m sincere about this.” As a territorial male started toward him, Stonehouse clapped his gloved hands, shouted, and kicked black volcanic sand up at its face. The seal stopped, huffed loudly, and sidled back to its original spot.
Between two rock knobs, a chinstrap-penguin colony sat on red krill-stained rocks. The gentoos choose a flat shelf area to nest and breed on; chinstraps prefer rocks, and gentoos a flatter terrain, so even though living in close quarters, they don’t compete with one another for nesting sites. A baby gentoo put its head up and made a metallic gargling sound. The babies, forming little crèches with their flippers wrapped around each other, achieved a look of intense mateyness. (Other animals, like young flamingos, eider ducklings, and baby bats, form crèches, too.) While the parents are away hunting food, the babies are open to attack from skuas and other birds and are a lot safer in a nursery of chicks. Not only is there strength in numbers, but adults wandering through to feed their young can help ward off attacks by skuas. King penguins feed their chicks for nine or ten months, so their young spend a long time in crèches. Returning from the sea, adult gentoos easily recognize their babies by voice. The pattern of white dots, bar over the eyes, and other characteristics also varies slightly from one individual to another.
A chick flapped rubbery flippers. It takes time for the bones to set into the strong, hard flight-muscles of the adult. As immature birds, gentoos have a great tendency to wander and may migrate as much as two hundred miles. But in the second year they will return to the rookery, ready to breed. Because they’re a mated pair, the gentoo couple doesn’t have to go back to the same site each year to nest. Like all other penguins, they take two to three weeks to build a nest and copulate, but they’re mobile and can change their nests. Because they don’t split up when the breeding season is over, they probably remain together as mates year-round. Gentoos are the most passive penguins, and perhaps that has been their undoing. There are only about forty thousand gentoos left in the world, but at least their numbers are not declining.
In some areas, the ground was streaked with beautiful white star-bursts—squirted guano—so that it looked like a moonscape. And it was pungent! Sailors have been known to use the smell of a well-known rookery as a navigation aid, especially when fog is too thick for them to see any of the birds. A pink tinge of algae glowed from beneath the snow, which acted as a greenhouse. Frost polygons had turned the sod into a six-sided design. A chinstrap raised its bill into the air, its air sacs puffed up, and it worked the bellows of its chest. Just offshore, a row of giant petrels waited for the chicks. The range of light was so wide it was taxing for the eye to take everything in—the round, dark, wet, sullen rocks, the brilliant white snow reflecting against low clouds in a visual echo chamber of white.
On the ground were the remains of that morning’s breakfast for a skua: a pair of orange penguin feet, a head, a skeleton. Stonehouse picked up the half-eaten chinstrap, showed me the flight muscles, the thick red ribbons that were the salt glands, and the concertina ribs. He handed me a small white feather, revealing the main shaft, and then, at its base, a second feather of silky down.
“Why would this one have died?” I said. “Why would a skua have singled it out?”
Turning the skeleton over, he discovered its eccentric bottom bill, bent at a ninety-degree angle. “You occasionally see penguins like this, with deformed bills. There’s no way they can feed correctly, but even if they did manage to feed, they still wouldn’t be able to preen themselves. So they would get heavily infested with lice. It’s very sad, like seeing a deformed and neglected child. That’s a simple, small thing to go wrong, when you think about it—just a misshapen bottom bill. But the chick would lead a difficult life for about nine months and then die of starvation. Before that happens, a skua usually identifies it as a weakling. Chicks running around without parents in this colony soon die, and they eventually form the debris on the floor of the colony that you see.”
Looking more closely at the ground, I saw the long scatter of bones for the first time and was stunned. We were standing in an ancient cemetery. This penguin colony lived on top of a graveyard that may have been thousands of years old. Under the feet and nests of the birds lay all the frozen, partially mummified remains of their ancestors. The cold had preserved their carcasses for as long as three thousand years. Most adult penguins die in the ocean, but babies die right on land, and no one removes their skeletons. The bones gradually sink into the permafreeze like designs into some fantastic paperweight. The chicks are born astride a grave. A wind gust sent feathers blowing into the air as if in a pillow fight. Penguins molt each year, some even shedding parts of their bills. The ground litter included not just corpses, but also pungent guano, spilled krill, blood, feathers, molted elephant-seal skin and hair, and miscellaneous bits of animal too dismembered for an amateur to identify.
Seeing Stonehouse with the chinstrap skeleton in his hands, his wife, Sally, walked up and smiled. Her lovely English complexion had gone ruddy in the brisk Antarctic air and a few wisps of brown hair strayed from under her knitted hat. “We’re so used to Daddy bringing home dead finnies,” she said cheerfully. “When we were in New Zealand, if we could find a dead penguin, he was always so pleased.”
Just then a lone male chinstrap tossed its helmeted head to the sky, arched its flippers back, and trumpeted an “ecstatic display” loud enough to stop a train. Its chest and throat rippled rhythmically as it called, as if with all its soul it hoped to lure a willing female by telling her that he was available and ready with a lovely little nesting site. Penguins are not profound thinkers, but their instincts guide them through all the demands of the landscape and of their hormones. An ecstatic display sounds both desperate and automatic. It may happen at any time, sometimes with good reason, sometimes by mistake, sometimes in a chorus of tens of thousands of voices screaming at the top of their lungs the equivalent of Tell me you love me! I said, Tell me you love me! It is a little like overhearing thousands of actors auditioning simultaneously for a Sam Shepard play. All summer, their frantic ecstasy fills the Antarctic air. Plighting their troth, an Adélie pair will do an ecstatic display, then the male will give her a precious and, to her eye, perfect stone. The actual copulation takes only seconds, and has been termed a cloacal kiss. Foreplay is everything—a complex drama of eye contact and body language. Courting males repeatedly bow to females, and the female has her own balletic gestures to use in reply.
“Well, he is eager, isn’t he?” Sally said good-naturedly. We laughed. Life goes on, having nowhere else to go.
Among green algae-covered rocks, thick whips of red algae streamed into the water. Fur seals and Weddell seals both lazed along the shoreline, and Stonehouse strolled over to photograph them. A chinstrap swayed back onto its heels and sat with its toes off the ground. A fur seal threatened us, bluffing, and Stonehouse tossed pebbles at it until it retreated.
“Fur seals, you know, have a bearlike ancestor; whereas those Weddell seals over there are descended from an otterlike ancestor.” He pointed to a pair of reclining seals with mottled, small heads and huge spaniel eyes, which were round and black as peat bogs. I suspect we are predisposed to like animals with large eyes. “They are very different,” he continued. “We think they are so similar because they look so different from other animals, but that really says more about us and our desire to group things together than it does about them.”
From iridescent-shelled limpets to wingless Antarctic flies to shrimplike krill to many species of seals to whales, porpoises, and birds, life teems around penguins. Of Antarctica’s 5.5 million square miles, only about 2 percent is not covered by ice, which is where small amounts of liverworts, algae, lichens, and mosses can grow. Large animals like penguins, seals, whales, and flying birds migrate, using the lands of Antarctica, to raise their young and to breed, but feed in the waters. To see most of Antarctica’s permanent land animals you would need a microscope or a magnifying glass: arthropods that live in the soil and moss; various species of mites; metezoa; tardigrades (tiny invertebrates that live in water); protozoa; worms; crustaceans; and one species of wingless fly, Belgica antarctica, which grows to a length of about half an inch. The wingless fly is the largest full-time resident of Antarctica. The frozen waters house a transparent, mysterious ice fish, which has no hemoglobin (red pigment) in its blood. A special blood protein acts as an antifreeze, so that ice crystals don’t form even though the fish lives among ice floes. But mainly, Antarctica supports herds of migrating animals—like the penguins, which come to feed in its crystal lagoons and raise young on its ragged shores before returning to their vast home of the sea.
Earlier that day, we had heard about an Argentinian oil spill nearby. The Bahia Paraíso, a supply ship carrying diesel fuel, jet fuel, compressed gases, and gasoline to the Argentine base Esperanza, had run onto the rocks. The ship had also been carrying passengers, and the captain had ignored warnings from local scientists and sailed into a dangerous area, called the pinnacles, not marked on Argentinian charts but clearly shown on others. When the ship ran aground, everybody climbed into the inflatable lifeboats. Fortunately, two tourist ships—the Society Explorer (the World Discoverer’s sister ship) and the Illiria—were in the vicinity and changed course to rescue the stranded passengers, towing the lifeboats to Palmer Station. But an estimated three hundred thousand gallons of diesel fuel spilled into the waters; some penguins, south polar skuas, and krill were killed outright; and sealed barrels of oil were turned loose to detonate later like time bombs and contaminate unknown shores. We had heard a rumor that the United Nations was trying to raise money to remove the young penguins that hadn’t gone into the water yet. But anyone who knew penguins knew that such efforts were futile. Penguins return to their home rookery to breed. If they avoided the oil now, they would find it when they returned home. The much ballyhooed oil-eating detergent we have read about wouldn’t solve the problem, either; it grabs hold of the oil, in effect, and drags it to the bottom of the ocean. That may save the life-forms at the top, but not those at the bottom. At the very least, it would agitate the krill, squid, and fish on which the penguins feed. Although the sea freezes at about 29° F. and doesn’t rise to beyond 32° F., it makes a thriving home for phytoplankton, the microscopic plants that are at the bottom of the food chain in the Antarctic.
The ecosystem thereabouts is simple in the sense that the food chain is very short, with only four or five steps. But contrary to what one might think, colder waters tend to be much more fertile than tropical waters. Because of the short summer season and intense sunlight, a tremendous amount of photosynthesis takes place and great seas of plantlife bloom, which means that tiny, grazing invertebrates have an unlimited supply of food, and so the population explodes. Ninety percent of an animal’s time is usually spent just trying to feed itself; if it doesn’t have to worry about that, it can devote itself more to breeding and the rearing of young. One result is the huge population of krill in the Antarctic, on which other creatures feed. There aren’t as many types of animals as you might find in warmer waters, but their sheer numbers are vast. And it all begins with phytoplankton and krill. The krill hang on underneath the ice floes, like upside-down sheep, grazing on the plantlife. In the austral summer, huge shoals of krill become visible in the water and whales feed on them. Weddell seals and penguins that breed in this season also feed on the krill. Around the sub-Antarctic islands, offshore kelp beds grow richer and more luxuriantly than anywhere else on earth. Vast numbers of krill graze, catching onto the plants with their hairy legs. Fish feed on the krill, squid feed on the fish, penguins feed on the squid, and seals, whales, and birds feed on the penguins, and so on. As Gregory Bateson once said, the world is only a small tide pool; disturb one part and the rest is threatened.
“Suppose it turns out to be a bad year for krill,” I said to Stonehouse, with a seriousness that needed no explanation.
“Penguins don’t trawl for krill the way whales do,” Stonehouse explained. “They catch them one at a time. Think about that. One study showed that when feeding, gentoo penguins have to catch a krill every six seconds to eat enough to survive. If it’s not a good krill season and the krill are small, then a penguin may have to catch twice as many in twice as many movements. That uses up a vast amount of energy, and they don’t have much to spare.”
“At least the ones here will probably make it.”
Stonehouse stopped, looked at me kindly, put one hand on my shoulder, and turned me to face the large, sprawling rookeries of noisy, courting, chick-rearing, squabbling, feeding penguins.
“For every hundred chicks we see there and there and there, only twenty-four will come back. They die mostly of starvation. The chicks don’t always know how to fish. Or they may be abandoned too early by their parents. Or hatch too late in the season. Or be malformed. Or be underweight. Or the sheathbills we can see flying about may attack them. Sheathbills often attack penguins feeding their young, but not to grab the baby. What the sheathbill wants is the krill the parent has collected. So it flies right at the penguins,” he said, using one hand to demonstrate, “startling them, and causing the parent’s regurgitated krill to splatter all over the ground, where the sheathbill can get it. Or the skuas may kill a chick. Or a leopard seal. The natural wastage among penguins is very high indeed. And, of course, human beings have been the most skillful penguin predators of all.”
He was correct, of course. Early visitors to penguin islands were so thrilled to have fresh food that they feasted on great herds. They boiled down penguins to make oil, and they collected their guano (an Inca word) for fertilizer. When in danger, a penguin instinctively leaps onto the land; and penguin hunters walked right up to them and clubbed them to death. Before Europeans “discovered” penguins, South American Indians used their hide for purses, slippers, and clothing, and collected their eggs. Penguin eggs have red yolks, because of the orangy krill they feed on (just as flamingos have pinkish feathers because of their diet) and translucent whites. There are records of early European ships collecting fifty barrels of penguin eggs at a time. In 1867, one trading company recorded boiling down 405,600 birds for their oil. Sir Francis Drake reported killing three thousand in one day. Probably the most famous penguin-oil distillery was on Macquarie Island (850 miles southeast of Tasmania), where visitors can still see the boilers. Although fishing for penguins is now outlawed, they are still endangered by oil spills and other forms of pollution. Beaches that are easy for penguins to land on are also easy for boats to land on, and many penguins end up having to compete with man and his pets and products. Perhaps the most ghoulish encounter between the two cultures happened when the Chilean base permitted its pet husky to roam and amuse itself. The dog, not all that far in evolution from its wolflike cousins, hunted down and ate a considerable number of penguins. I understand this also happened, but with packs of sled dogs, at Esperanza base. As if that weren’t bad enough, DDT metabolites have already been found in the tissues of Adélie penguins. As birder Roger Tory Peterson has observed: “Penguins may eventually prove to be the litmus paper of the sea, an indicator of the health of our watery planet.”
“What was that sound?” I said suddenly. “A gunshot?”
Stonehouse looked around carefully, searching the rookeries. “Possibly an exploding egg. Yes, I know it sounds strange, but it happens all the time. Addled or rotten eggs will begin to stink and then become explosive. Sometimes you can hear the explosion, and then you’ll see a very puzzled penguin and know what happened—he was incubating a bad egg and it blew up under him.”
On our way back toward the waiting Zodiacs, keeping an eye out for a puzzled penguin, we passed a wallow of elephant seals, whose belching stench hit us like a mallet. We saw leopard seals cruising offshore. Fur seals may occasionally take penguins, and even wait for them at the shoreline when they stumble through the surf, but the real killers of penguins are leopard seals. One was found to have the remains of eighteen Adélie penguins in its stomach. When a leopard seal grabs a penguin, it beats it to pieces on the surface of the water, and the smacking sound is audible for considerable distances. It leaves the skin floating in the water, sometimes with the head still attached. Roger Tory Peterson reports that penguins have a warning “babble that plainly means ‘leopard seal.’” Small wonder penguins are so tentative about entering the sea. Any dark object in the surf may be a leopard seal. Or any clapping sound, as of flippers hitting the water. Such seals are beautiful, of course, as predators frequently are. They have a snakelike head, canine teeth, a slender, grayish-black back that becomes silver-gray, or even bluish, on the belly, and tawny spots on their underside. The males grow to nine feet long and weigh around seven hundred pounds, the females even larger, at ten feet long and up to a thousand pounds. Leopard-seal ultrasonic “chirps” have been recorded, noises similar to the echolocation sounds of bats, and some scientists think leopard seals must be able to echolocate when they feed under the opaque winter ice. Even if they don’t echolocate, they’re expert at telling the direction of an underwater sound. They are supreme predators, and as we climbed back into the rubber rafts to return to the ship, we watched them with horror and awe.
At night, we gathered in the ship’s lounge to decry the oil spill, as well as the insensitivity of the French engineers who were building an airstrip right through the middle of an important Adélie penguin rookery. Stonehouse, who edits the Polar Record (a magazine of Antarctic research, which also monitors the latest political developments related to the region), solicited our ideas on how best to protect the fragile ecosystem of the Antarctic.
A woman across the room raised her hand, explained that she belonged to Greenpeace, and was anxious about Antarctica for many reasons. “I understand the Japanese are harvesting krill to make pet food,” she said, her voice thick with emotion.
“Which nobody wants,” Stonehouse said, “because it’s cheaper to get pet food from other sources. But sometime in the near future they may find a way to bring krill up to human standards. At the moment, it isn’t convenient to harvest. It spoils easily. You’ve got to put it straight into a deep freeze. Now, that means a different kind of ship and much more expensive processing. And then you’ve got to find a way to make it highly valuable, say, the equivalent of caviar. I don’t think using it as dog food will ever be a threat. But it will be very much worth the taking when they find a high-quality market for it.”
“They’re trying to go after penguins, too,” she said, smoothing the hem of her khaki skirt. “I understand they recently attempted to take four hundred thousand penguins, and the Argentinian government was all for it.”
Stonehouse nodded. “You believe in the sanctity of wild animals.”
“Yes,” she said emphatically.
“Let me show you what a complicated issue this is. It wouldn’t be if all of the players in the drama were at the same level or had as much to gain or lose, but that’s not the way it is. Now, supposing a third world country came to us. Supposing the Indonesians said: ‘We want to take twenty thousand seals a year because we’ve found a market for fur-seal skins in China—an unlimited market.’ It could be quite a modest number in terms of the size of the population of seals. ‘We’ll monitor the operation scrupulously. In other words, we’ll do everything properly. We’re going to bring a lot of prosperity to Indonesians, many of whom are poor and hungry. It will build up a little leather and fine-fur industry and the quality of life in Indonesia will improve.’ What would your answer be? Whose side are you on?”
“I would suggest that they find something else to profit from—improved crops, for instance.”
“That won’t satisfy people with empty stomachs.”
“Ah, but what about rice? Rice can feed people.”
“Don’t forget, in many third world countries there’s a great premium on the land. You see, this is not just an emotional problem— it’s a political problem, a social problem. If anybody is going to starve, you can bet it won’t be the Americans or the British. We’ve gone through our industrial revolutions. We didn’t get prosperity and the standard of living we’re enjoying by not using our resources. Now, who are we to tell people in developing nations, ‘Your right to use nature’s resources is over.’ It would look to them as if we wealthier nations felt that they should starve so that we could have the luxury of a zoo without walls.”
“Surely you don’t believe that!” she said, leaning forward and slicing an open hand through the air.
“Of course not. But I think this is how the argument is going to go. And we’ve got to be prepared with much better reasons than conscience—the fact that the Antarctic greatly affects the weather all over the world, for instance, just as the rain forests do; that the world’s drinking water is tied up here—reasons that will make practical sense to people with other things on their mind, like getting from day to day. Remember, most people know very little about Antarctica.”
Yes, I thought, they know more about the moon or the planets. I remembered going to the grocery store one summer day, when Viking II had just landed on Mars, and hearing people in line casually discussing Martian weather. They marveled at the surface winds and the sunsets. Yet did they know about Antarctica, the world of penguins? One of the Apollo astronauts, returning to Earth, said that there was a “white lantern” shining at the bottom of the world. All of us on this sailing had seen it shining, had used its light to construe some of the dark corners in our lives, and were afraid that its ice and other wonders would one day vanish.
“I just feel that Antarctica should be kept as a world park instead of exploiting it for minerals and wildlife and oil,” she said.
“Yes. A lot of people, including many scientists, are extremely arrogant about their view, and want Antarctica as a continent for scientists. I think that’s a mistake. I don’t think it’s for scientists alone at all. It’s for anybody to get to know, people like you.”
“Well, I mean, keep it as it is—no more population and no more pollution. There would be an international agreement to preserve it.”
“All right,” Stonehouse said. “I might begin to go along with this, it sounds like a good idea. But who is going to rule the damn place? Who knows enough about it to be able to manage it except the people who are already involved with it?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be one person or another, it would be a group of countries.”
“Are we going to turn the United Nations loose on it? They can’t even run their own building.”
“Whoever has claims there right now and research stations right now. Maybe those people combined with …”
“But they have conflicting claims.”
“… combined with scientists, environmentalists …”
“Okay. Who’s going to police it? You see, there isn’t an Antarctic Treaty authority.”
“How does it work now?”
“If you’re working in the Antarctic, you’re working under the control of your own country, not under the control of Antarctica. You are controlled by your own government, your own law. An American couldn’t arrest me for doing something wrong. All he could do is report me to the British government. In the same way, I can’t stop a Chilean or an Argentinian from doing something I don’t like. I can only point out that I intend to report him to his government. Which he might find laughable.”
“Suppose,” I offered, “you had a group of multinational guides, who served a tour of duty in the Antarctic. It could be like joining the Peace Corps. The lecturers wouldn’t arrive on the boats, they would be waiting for the boats. These people could also act as wardens of the park. And they could rotate, so that they wouldn’t be serving one country’s ships or one company often enough to perhaps become compromised.”
“I like that idea. Now, whom do they report to?”
I laughed, dispirited. “We’re back to a world court.”
“Exactly. One with the power to embarrass or fine or punish wrongdoers. Don’t misunderstand me. I believe this is a solvable problem, but it’s a difficult one. It has to be solved in a clearheaded way, with good, practical solutions. How we decide the fate of the Antarctic is extremely important, because we’re going to face this problem over and over again as other crucial ecosystems become endangered.”
With more questions raised than answered, we finally retreated to our cabins for the night. Some stayed up late, roaming the open decks, in long johns and parkas, to savor the eerie sparkle of moonlight on the wild ice.
Somewhere along the way, we had lost the nighttime. Where did we lose it? In the deserted whaling station, in whose smoky hall we ate a barbecue of reindeer meat and danced to Glenn Miller? At the Polish station, whose greenhouses grew snapdragons and tomatoes? In the volcanic ring of Deception Island? Watching rippling terraces of Adélie penguins go about their lapidary business, obsessed with nesting stones? At the small British base, Signey, whose young men had not seen strangers, or women, for nearly two years? (Visiting with us in the lounge, some of them were trembling; and we sent them away with handshakes, good wishes, and sacks of potatoes, onions, and other fresh food.) At the Valentine’s Day dance, on seas so rough that dancers held on to the ceiling? On Elephant Island, a forbidding snag of mountain but a thriving chinstrap rookery, where Shackleton and his men landed after their trials on the pack ice? At the eerie, deserted penguin rookery, where watching a lone penguin chick face the death machine of a rampaging skua, which played out its instincts blow by blow, tortured our hearts? Among the guano-thick beaches, where waves of hungry penguins bobbed in the sea and babies clamored to be fed? Listening to the assistant cruise director, a fine pianist, give recitals of Debussy, Haydn, Bach, and Beethoven against a backdrop of sunstruck glaciers?
Now we lived only in a late summer twilight. Icebergs clustered around us like statuary as the ship sailed through the Gerlache Strait, which separates the Antarctic Peninsula from Brabant and Anvers islands. Each narrow waterway seemed to lead into another one, until finally we sailed through the Lemaire Channel, which narrows to a mere sixteen hundred feet wide at its southern end. This too was the penguins’ world. On either side of the ship, glaciers spilled into the sea, jagged mountain peaks rose into the clouds, and icebergs roamed freely. In the channel, the water was like lucid tar, with icebergs of all sizes drifting through it, their white tops a thin reflection of mortality—their blue bases pale and inscrutable. The blazing white of an iceberg lay on a thick wide base of blue ancient as the earth, older than all of the people who had ever seen it or who had ever visited the Antarctic combined. The icebergs took all sorts of shapes, and some had fissures through which a searing blue light shone. In the wake of an iceberg the water looked like oiled silk because the surface of the water had been smoothed by the ice’s palm. On both sides of the boat, black, jagged, ice-drizzled mountains reflected in the mirror surface. On a small berg, five gentoo penguins sat, their white bonnets sparkling in the sun. On another small berg sat their death—a leopard seal, sprawling on one side, idly scratching its flank with a five-fingered paw.
“Seehund,” a woman from Frankfurt said solemnly. We were all on the side of the penguins, though nature should have no partisans, no sides, no center, except the center that is forever shifting, as Emerson said, a center that moves within circles and circles that move.
Great tongues of ice stretch out from the continent and speak in a language like music, with no words but with undeniable meaning. And like music, the vista is a language we don’t have to learn to be profoundly moved—we who do not just use our environment but also appreciate, admire, even worship it. True, we kill other life-forms to survive, but we feel a kinship to them, we apologize for stealing their life from them. We are the most vital creatures ever to inhabit the earth, and the one truth we live by is that life loves life. Still, nature proceeds “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson said. This becomes simpler to see in a simpler environment. When you walk through a penguin rookery, where the underweight chicks stand doomed and the skuas maneuver like custodians of death, pages of Darwin’s Origin of Species spring to life in front of you. All the cozy denials we use as shields fall aside.
The sky that day was clear, and the air as astringent as ammonia vapor. The sun poured down but had no heat, and the ice mountains occasionally revealed weavings of blue and green. After the darkness of winter, the five months of summer sun did not warm things up much. Because the sun rode so low on the horizon, it seemed to have little warmth. The ice reflected the heat back into the sky. Most people on board had greatly dilated pupils by then, a side effect of the scopolamine patch they wore behind one ear to ward off seasickness. It made them look a little like zombies, but it also allowed their eyes to take in big gulps of light. In Zodiacs, we drifted along the peninsula, through an ice-sculpture garden. Heraclitus said you never step in the same stream twice. The Antarctic version of that is that you never see the same iceberg twice. Because each iceberg is always changing, one sees a personal and unique iceberg that no one else has ever seen or will ever see. They are not always smooth. Many had textures, waffle patterns, pockmarks, and some looked pounded by Persian metalsmiths. A newly calved iceberg lay like a chunk of glass honeycomb, spongy from being underwater. (At some point it was other-side-up.) Another had beautiful blue ridges like muscles running along one side. So many icelets thickened the water, each one quivering with sparkle, that the sea looked like aluminum foil shaken in the sun. There were baths of ice with blue lotion, ice grottos, ice curved round the fleecy pelt of a lamb, razor-backed ice, sixteen ice swans on an ice merry-go-round, ice pedestals, ice combs, ice dragons with wings spread, an ice garden where icebergs grew and died, ice tongs with blue ice between their claws, an ice egret stretching its wings and a long rippling neck out of the water. Apricot light spilled over the distant snow-tipped mountains. Chunky wedges of peppermint-blue ice drifted past us. Behind us, the Zodiac left a frothy white petticoat. And farther beyond, shapes arched out of the water—penguins feeding, oblivious to what we call beauty.
We paused at Paradise Bay, where blue-eyed shags nested along the cliffs, a whale maneuvered at a distance, penguins porpoised to feed, and crabeater seals lazed on small icebergs, red krill juice dripping down their chins. Through pale green water, clear and calm, a gray rocky bottom was shining, along with red and brown seaweeds and patches of yellow-blooming phytoplankton. A loud explosion startled us and, turning, we saw ice breaking off a glacier to become an iceberg, which would float for four years or so before it succumbed to the sea. I looked down through the fathoms of crystal water to the smooth rocks on the bottom. Suddenly an eight-foot leopard seal swiveled below the boat, surfaced to breathe, cut a fast turn, and began circling the Zodiac, around and around, underneath it and alongside. Each time it spun underwater, large blue air bubbles rose to the surface like jellyfish. Mouth open, baring its sharp yellow teeth, it lunged up through the water and bit a pontoon on the Zodiac. “Back away from the edge!” David Kaplan, our driver, said with contained urgency, and the twelve passengers leaned inward, away from the attacking seal, which could leap out of the water and seize an arm, pulling a person under. Circling, fast, handsome, wild, ferocious, it spun below again, dove, and leapt to the surface. It was attacking us as it would penguins on an ice floe. We who live at the top of our food chain rarely get the chance to feel like prey, to watch a predator maneuver around us with a deftness that’s instinctive, cunning, and persistent—and live to tell about it.
“Just an average day in Paradise,” Kaplan said, brightening the motor and heading for shore. We climbed out at an abandoned Argentinian base. As the clouds drifted behind the peninsula, the continent itself appeared to be moving, as of course it was. On a rock ledge, an Antarctic tern—a small white bird with black cap and startling red beak and matching red feet—thrilled the sky with song. A teal vein of copper ore cascaded down the rocks among patches of fiery orange lichen and green moss. As the rest of our party climbed up a steep slope of glacier to the top of a mountain where a wooden cross had been planted, I stood like a sentinel, still as a penguin, watching my kind struggle up the hill from the sea. Across the bay, the snow mountains were glazed in a dusky pink light and the water was cerulean blue. Gray clouds hung in front of and below the powdered tops of the mountains. The air was so pure that the clouds looked cut-out and solid, suspended by a sleight of hand, a magician’s trick. Mirrors lay scattered on the surface of the water, where there was no ice to disrupt the flowing light. A blue iceberg shaped like open jaws a hundred feet high floated near shore. Corrugated-metal buildings shot off hot orange. A long hem of brash ice undulated across the south end of the bay. Somewhere the leopard seal sat looking for less elusive quarry, and would find it.
The birders were up early as we approached Coronation Island, in the South Orkneys; they were desperate to spot an Antarctic petrel, a bird that resembles but is slightly larger than the many pintados, or painted petrels, swirling in small tornadoes behind the boat. Most Antarctic petrels are in their rookeries as much as a hundred miles inland from the ice shelf. When one finally winged across the water, the birders went berserk.
“Oh! There it is! Beautiful!” a woman cried.
“Wow! The nape is almost buff!” said an enraptured man.
All the Antarctic petrels we saw that day were pale. They were in molt, a wonderful coffee-tan color, and flapped stiffly because their new feathers weren’t in yet. To see one or two at this time of year so far out was a bonus. However, many of us were not looking for petrels but for a rarer sight: the emperor penguin. Largest of all penguins, emperors can dive to nearly nine hundred feet to feed on squid and stay submerged for nearly twenty minutes or more. When they stand in the snow like vigilant UFO watchers, they have the usual black-and-white coloring, but also a spill of honey at their throats and cheeks. Emperor penguins are such altruistic parents— or fanatical, depending on your point of view—that they will even pick up a frozen or ruined egg and try to incubate it, or try to incubate stones or an old dead chick. An abandoned or wayward chick will immediately be adopted. Sometimes adults even squabble so much over a chick that the chick gets hurt or killed in the process. Emperors rarely, if ever, touch bare ground. They live out their whole lives standing sentry on shelf ice or swimming in the ocean. Unfortunately, their rookeries were too far south for us to see them.
A small flock of Antarctic prions hydroplaned over the water, plowing a furrow through it, using their tongues to sift krill into a feeding pouch under the jaw, feeding the way baleen whales do.
“Bird alert! Bird alert!” sounded over the intercom, waking passengers from their slumber and early diners from drowsy breakfasts. “EP alert! EP alert! A juvenile emperor penguin has been spotted off the stern of the boat!” I ran to the stern, colliding with people frantically running up the stairs from the cabins below, HOLD THESE RAILS it said on brass plates at each stairway on every deck, as if in rebuke to excited birders who had been turning the ship into an aviary. The stampede ended with a clash of bodies on the stern deck. And there it was: porpoising out of the water, looking like part of an inner tube with a flash of yellow showing every now and again. Then it vanished, and we were left standing quietly with our amazement. To glimpse an emperor penguin in the wild, feeding this far from its home, was a benediction.
Stowing my binoculars, I went downstairs to breakfast, which I barely touched. Despite the elaborate meals, I’d been losing weight at a reckless pace. It was as if I was being nourished so thoroughly through my senses that I felt too full to eat. Before coming to the Antarctic, I had thought that penguins lived in a world of extreme sensory deprivation. But I had found just the opposite—a landscape of the greatest sensuality. For one thing, there was so much life, great herds of animal life to rival those in East Africa. Many people have compared Antarctica to a wasteland; instead, it is robust with life. For another, the range of colors was breathtaking; though subtle, it had changing depths and illuminations, like flesh tones. The many colors were in the ever-bluing sky, in the cloud formations, the muted light, the midnight sun, the auroras dancing over still waters with icebergs and crash ice, and in areas that dazzled like small hand mirrors, through which black-and-white penguins dove. Who would have imagined the depth of blue in the icebergs, appearing as sugar-frosted cakes with muted sunlight bursting off them?
Or the scale, the massiveness—sitting alongside an iceberg, you couldn’t see around it in either direction. One day the water was so smooth that you could use it as a mirror, and four hours later the wind was howling at ninety knots. And was as beautiful at ninety knots as when crystal-calm. Huge ice caverns formed arches of pastel ice. Glare had so many moods that it seemed another pure color. The mountains, glaciers, and fjords bulged and rolled through endless displays of inter-flowing shapes. The continent kept turning its shimmery hips, and jutting up hard pinnacles of ice, in a sensuality of rolling, sifting, cascading landscapes. There was such a liquefaction to its limbs. And yet it could also be blindingly abstract, harrowing and remote, the closest thing to being on another planet, so far from human life that its desolation and iciness made you want to do impetuous, life-affirming things: commit acts of love, skip Zodiacs at reckless speeds over the bays, touch voices with a loved one by way of satellite, work out in the gym on thrones of steel until your muscles quit, drink all night, be passionate and daring, renew the outlines of your humanity.
Nowhere, yet, had we seen king penguins, the species I helped raise at Sea World, the most gaudily colored of all. To find them, we had to sail again across galloping seas, and when at last we dropped anchor at Cooper Island, at the tip of South Georgia, and climbed into our Zodiacs, we realized that we had arrived at one of the most astonishing places on earth.
Our first sight of land was from the rafts, on seas that smacked them hard against each swell. The mountains of Cooper Island stretch high and green to ice-capped peaks. When American ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy visited it in 1912, he called it “a stretch of the Alps in mid-ocean.” Macaroni penguins, named after the Yankee Doodle dandies because they have orange spaghetti bangs hanging from their heads, clotted the hillsides, and their collective clamor—part bray, part clack—resounded louder than the surf. Albatrosses, terns, petrels, and other birds swirled in relentless squadrons overhead, planed low over the water, squealing and chirping, or clustered on the hillside. Schools of macaroni penguins porpoised through the water all around our Zodiacs, which quickly seemed to be boiling in a cauldron of penguins. Fur seals clambered onto the many rock outcroppings near shore, and gave gargling barks. The whole scene shimmered, fluorescent with life. So many animals moved in the foreground, and in the background, that your eyes strained to focus on both at once. It was like traveling through the middle of a pop-up storybook. Magic realism had sprung to life. In each cove, penguins leapt out of the water like solid balls of rubber to land safely on the rocks, as we staggered toward one shore after another, looking for a safe place to land. Finally, we headed for a small, wave-tossed beach, hit hard, climbed out fast, and let the Zodiac return to deeper waters. Fur seals basked on the shore, some hidden behind large boulders, some sitting on top of the thronelike tussocks. Those steeply tussocked cliffs gave way to a high field above us, and beyond that stood a scree-torn mountain capped with snow.
Brittmarie, a Swedish-born climber from California, whose candor and zest I liked, looked at me, then at the craggy bluffs overhead.
“Let’s do it,” I said, and we exchanged grins.
Sneaking away far left, around the sleeping fur seals, we started to climb up a steep, rocky creekbed.
“Three points!” she yelled down to me as I scrambled up behind on the slippery rocks. “Always be secure at three points!”
“Words to live by!” I called back. Soon we found ourselves walled in by thick cliffs with dense tussocks hanging from them.
“It’s straight up,” Brittmarie said, smiling. “What do you think?”
There is an art to climbing tussock-grass mountains, I’m sure. An amateur like me could only improvise. Because the grass clumped tightly at the base, I held on securely there as I pulled myself up, stepping in the mud between the tussock clumps. Petrels had made burrows among the tussocks, which I used as footholds whenever possible. If you have the upper-body strength, you can hold on with both hands, as if climbing a rope ladder, and find safe footing. Halfway up the hill, panting hard, we paused to rest. If anything, the hill above looked even steeper, the tussocks bulging overhead. Suppose the edge tussocks weren’t firmly rooted and broke off? We decided to angle up, and finally we reached the top, where a field of tussocks led across promontories to a distant group of nesting albatrosses with their chicks. Half an hour later, we managed to steal up on them in the grass. Fluffy gray chicks swiveled around to face us, each with a black bridle-shaped stripe across its mouth. One or two began clacking to warn us away. Their parents flew overhead or at eye level or soared along the cliffs below us. Perched on that height, in the windy mist, while albatrosses maneuvered, we saw the ship rolling on the freshening sea, where Captain Lampe, whose skills we had learned to respect in the iceberg-clotted channels, was holding steady against wind and current. We saw Zodiacs plunging through the water to unload. We saw lens-shaped clouds prowling the mountains, and knew they signaled stronger winds. But our goal was higher still. Hand over hand, leaping small pits and bogs, we climbed toward an unmistakable sound—a chattery braying. There, hundreds of feet above the sea, sprawled a rookery of macaroni penguins. Plump, slightly farouche-looking, with orange hair parted in the middle, they ran around like miniature Zero Mostels. How on earth they managed the climb we did not know. But climb it they often did, with their stomachs full of food, to feed their waiting young. We knew that it would be almost impossible for a creature that can’t fly to get up the mountain. Fortunately, the penguins didn’t know it, and here they were.
“Think of the energy it must take for a little, short-legged bird to walk up over all those sharp, rocky slopes to get to the top to breed,” Brittmarie said, pulling a camera from her blue knapsack. “It’s beyond comprehension.”
“Tenacity,” I said, thinking out loud—and not meaning the macaroni penguin’s tenacity, exactly, but life’s. Life hangs on in such out-of-the-way places, pushes on with such ingenuity and bravado. Turning over a mother-of-pearl-lined limpet shell on Elephant Island a few days earlier, I had seen a hundred squirming wingless flies. Life just seemed to keep reinventing itself—inside a limpet shell, or hundreds of feet up a rocky cliff above a roaring ocean.
When the seas started to grow dangerously rough, we were summoned back to the boat, and set sail at long last for the king penguin rookeries at Gold Harbor and Salisbury Plain, on the island of South Georgia. At Salisbury Plain, our Zodiacs cut through thick curling waves onto a steep beach. For some reason there was the sound of harmonicas and, occasionally, distant oncoming trains. Turning, I saw a nearby hill seemingly squirming in the sunlight and automatically walked toward it. All at once it reeled into focus as a bustling, fidgeting, buzzing, clamorous, colossal king-penguin metropolis that sprawled for miles, pouring along the scimitar-shaped beach, through interfolding valleys, spilling down the hillsides. It was penguin heaven. The adults stood tall, with those splendid pairs of orange commas on their cheeks, a radiant sun-yellow blooming at their throats, and an apricot or lavender comet along each side of their bills. Stately, curious, they allowed me to sit down right among them. One slightly potbellied king, carrying an egg on its feet, “head-flagged” with its mate, bobbing and sweeping heads like signalmen with flags, or shadow boxers. Then the female touched her bill to her brood patch—a vertical opening where she held the egg—tossed her head up, and rubbed her bill back and forth across her mate’s neck, as if to sharpen it on the whetstone of his desire. A neighbor bashed them both with its flippers and they screeched a rude reply.
Kings don’t like being crowded. Thousands of birds stood close together in the rookery. Like soldiers in line, replying to the command of “Dress left!” or “Dress right!” they occasionally put out a flipper to keep their neighbor at a comfortable distance. Any attacking skua would face an impenetrable sea of sharp upturned bills. It would be like flying into a bed of nails. King penguins know exactly how much space they need to feel secure but not hemmed in, and they are rarely more than a flipper smack or a bill lunge away from one another. Four bachelors strutted by smartly in a line, looking gallant and available. One paused in front of a female, pointed its apricot-striped bill skyward, thrust out its chest, cranked its flippers back, and flapped rhythmically as if he were trying to lift off. A hoarse drumbeat throbbed in his throat, then changed to a climactic braying of two tones at once—the harmonica I had heard. His ecstatic display was all aces, and the female responded. They head-flagged together for a while, then, for a long time, stared at each other and chattered. The male suddenly threw his shoulders back and strolled forward, in what scientists call the advertisement walk. Looking as swell as possible in penguin terms, he turned his head from side to side so that she could see what beautiful orange ear-patches he had. If she followed him, it was a marriage. Then, several other bachelors waddled up and tried to muscle in, gently chasing the female toward the shore. Demure, she held her flippers to her side while the bachelors crowed and raved. Ultimately, her original swain won out, and bumped her repeatedly, though gently, with his chest, herding her to the outskirts of the rookery, where they had a little more room. In time, he would stand right on top of her back, mate in as little as forty seconds with a cloacal kiss, and then climb down, leaving his muddy footprints behind.
To pledge their devotion, a nearby couple plunged into a suite of “mutual displays,” which looked like ecstatic displays except that both male and female took part. Facing each other, they were soon weaving their heads from side to side and crying out in joy, finally pointing their bills up to the sky. Doing this every few minutes keeps their bond strong. Most penguins return to the same nest the following year, and the same mate, whose voice they recognize. Birds whose mates have died, or with whom they weren’t able to nest successfully the previous year, must find new mates. If the rookery is disturbed for any reason, couples often engage in mutual displays, which they also do when an egg is laid or when they change shifts in incubating an egg—in fact, whenever it seems wise to restate their vows. Insinuating themselves through the rookery, at speed, two penguins did the “slender walk.” All they wanted was to get from their nests to the sea without stopping to fight or give anybody grief, so they held their flippers tightly against their sides, slicked down their feathers, and slid through as inoffensively as possible. In a major rookery, everything is happening at once and you can see just about all the phases of the king’s life cycle going on simultaneously. A fluffy baby peered out from under a parent’s soft white belly. A larger baby turned to hide by sticking its head under a parent’s belly, leaving its oversized rump outside. A small gaggle of “mohawks,” molting babies that have a stripe of down on top of their heads, chased an adult and screamed to be fed. In their fury, they raced right over the remains of disemboweled chicks.
A king stood on his heels and dusted the snow behind him with his tail. By then, I had removed my parka to reveal a bright-yellow sweatsuit. Although I’m shaped wrong and don’t have cheek commas, my black hair and screaming-yellow body were the right colors to interest a king penguin, which shuffled up close, cocked a head to one side, then to the other, and carefully checked me over. There is, ordinarily, a no-man’s-land between us and wild animals. They fear us and shy away. But penguins are among the very few animals on earth that cross that divide. They seem to regard us as penguins, too, perhaps of a freakish species. After all, we stand upright, travel in groups, talk all the time, sort of waddle. Still, though I was black and yellow and in a submissive posture, I was not the penguin he hankered for, he decided at long last, not one of his kind, and he shuffled away slowly, keeping an eye on me until he disappeared into the gyrating sea of black and white.
A low, smothery cloud bank drifted overhead. It was going to be a rainy night in South Georgia. Surrounded by penguin society, which began to close its ranks behind me, I thought of brown-white-left, the fluffy chick I helped raise at Sea World in San Diego. Moved to Orlando, his final home, he would already be fledging. Even if he could understand me, how could I begin to describe his homeland and the rigors of penguin life in the Antarctic? How poor his odds would be of survival? I was probably with his parents, perhaps his brothers and sisters, certainly cousins, right here in this rookery. When I thought of the horror of a penguin being flayed alive by a leopard seal, my skin crawled. Nature neither gives nor expects mercy. I gently touched the sleek oiled back of a lovely nesting penguin, with a fine set of commas, whose feathers were tipped in a bluish gleam. For brown-white-left, life would be more artificial, of course, but also much safer, and it was good to know that he was alive a world away. Safe from hunger, leopard seal, and skua, he was probably sitting like a pensioner on a park bench as he watched the silent pageant passing on the moving sidewalk beyond the glass, where ghostly humans floated in a darkness deep as the Antarctic night.