by Carl Safina
* * *
Today we’ll put flipper tags on five hundred Adélie chicks. We halt where a group of dark chicks in fluffy charcoal down stand together in a group called a crèche. We spread a thirty-foot-wide net and gently herd young penguins toward the barricade.
As fair warning, Wayne shows me his hands, the backs of which are crisscrossed with faded half-inch scars made by penguins.
With the chicks corralled, Sue demonstrates: “See, you just lift the bird by its flippers, then sling it between your knees so that its back legs are well behind yours.” (A penguin chick is a loaded weapon; despite our attempts to keep their back ends pointed away from us, our slickers are soon caked with guano.) “Then put the tag around the left flipper, and close it with the pliers.” The tag is a bit like a flattened ring, with a serial number that identifies individuals.
“Okay,” I say to Sue, “I could use a penguin right about now.” She hands one to me and I sling it between my legs like an old hand. The chicks are so downy, handling them seems like a cross between bird banding and sheep shearing. With the dust from the down and the smell of guano thick on the breeze, the place is a bit rank, but without the stench it’d be a lesser place. When I’m sure that the tag is closed smoothly, will stay in place, and won’t chafe, Wayne nods; the bird waddles off in an excited hurry. We trudge up rocky slopes to higher colonies with names such as Tortilla Flats, Trojan Plains, and Funky Town. The penguins like places with the best views. Hours later, when we apply the five hundredth flipper tag, we have moved about a mile and gained three hundred feet of elevation.
Marking individuals is the only way to understand how long they’re living—or how fast they’re dying. Wayne and Sue have found that survival rates are dropping. Up through the 1980s, the chances of a young Adélie surviving its first years at sea were about four out of ten. Since 1990 it has been more like one out of ten.
That’s about the time the winter sea ice started rapidly shrinking. Suspected: something about the penguins’ food is changing. That’s what Wayne and Sue are trying to figure out.
* * *
Each evening now in the Adélie villages, there’s a graduating class of seven-week-old youngsters. Along the shore, they come down to the beach a dozen or two at a time. Their graduation attire: alabaster white and glossy black, with a downy brown cap. At the shore, they halt. Any adult entering the sea, they study with intense fascination. Hours pass.
I watch a youngster vigorously flapping its flippers while leaping into the air, as though its fledgling hormones have triggered its brain to run some ancestral shadow memory of flight. Like any adolescent confronted by a wild new experience of youth, young Adélies facing their first swim seem both afraid and very excited. Finally, one gets brave and goes—and this wad of young penguins all spill into the water.
Unlike the nonmigratory Gentoo chicks, who come and go comfortably from little exploratory swims, for the Adélies water is a once-and-for-all deal. They won’t return to land for several years, so it’s a very abrupt life-changing event—and they can’t swim.
The Adélies hit the sea crazed and panicky, flapping and flailing, thrashing and splashing as though trying to stay off the water, seemingly afraid they’ll sink and drown. When the furious flipper flapping starts to tire them and they realize they actually float, they seem quite surprised by the whole thing. Sitting unpenguinlike, with heads up high like ducks, they begin uttering honking calls as they paddle seaward. With the true courage of the fearful, they go straight toward their odyssey to the unknown, and never waver.
But subtle, they’re not. The noise carries.
One of the trailing fledgers suddenly goes end over end in a spray of red-and-white water. For a Leopard Seal, picking a fledger from the surface must be about as easy as picking tomatoes.
A spreading oil slick immediately draws several giant petrels, a couple of gulls, and a dozen little Wilson’s Storm-Petrels. These daintily dipping robin-sized birds are world travelers capable of routinely riding out the harshest ocean weather on the planet. One of the world’s most abundant birds, they migrate all the way from the Antarctic throughout the Atlantic, Indian, and South Pacific Oceans, a vast swath of world. Since childhood I’ve seen them, sometimes by the hundreds, in waters off Long Island and New England.
The Leopard spends several minutes on the surface, thrashing the penguin from its skin. It returns at leisure to the carcass, and its elongated, reptilian-looking head shakes off the next bite.
While the seal is occupied, penguins pass at safe distances, and even swim though the slick. When all returns to quiet, the bay is as full of porpoising penguins as ever.
Ten minutes later, fifty yards away: another splash, another spreading slick.
* * *
The weather delays our day’s plans, and for hours we sit in the kitchen reorganizing equipment, getting caught up on data, and working on cameras.
Eventually, though, we suit up—heavy insulated boots, waterproof pants, parka over layered clothing, fleece hat, gloves—for the walk to Paradise.
Wayne and Sue need to get samples of food from Chinstrap Penguins nesting across the island near a place called Paradise Cove. They warn me: it can be a challenging hike.
The first leg is a long coast walk. At every stretch of open gravel and every partly sheltered cove, ribs, skulls, and the great curving arcs of whales’ mandibles lie embedded in the beach. In the twentieth century, industrial whalers took something like a million whales from the Antarctic. Though the Antarctic is the greatest whale habitat on Earth, Leviathan remains rare in its realm—and still stalked by Japanese ships.
Here in Antarctica, as in the Arctic, what remains abundant about whales is their bones. In one stretch, you can walk three hundred yards on whales’ bones without stepping on the beach. The bones lie like felled trunks. One nearly intact skull—this must be from a Blue Whale—measures about twelve feet across its width, eye to eye. Lengthwise, from tip of jaw to base of skull, it paces out at twenty-seven boot lengths. The lower jawbone is so thick that, though lying on the beach, it comes up past my knees.
* * *
About a mile and a half from Copa, we round a headland called “the Sphinx” and start across a stark, wide bowl of land bounded by mountains and the sea. Deep snowfields lie up against the mountains, pierced by occasional spires of rock.
“This landscape has changed so much,” Wayne says. “Before, there was a hundred-foot-thick snowbank. Now, every bit of this snow will disappear before we leave.”
He points, saying, “That one peak was sticking out of this glacier when I first came here, but now you see about a hundred feet more of it. That’s how much it’s thinned.” Almost to himself he adds, “Look at all these exposed slopes and peaks—”
Pushed here by a sheet of ice not long ago, the ground remains desolate to the distant hills. It’s the moon, with wind.
But how wrong that impression is; Wayne reaches into the seemingly lifeless scree beneath our feet, hands me an odd-shaped rock, and says, “Petrified wood.”
There was a forest here? We soon find a remnant of a tree stump nearly two feet in diameter. Its growth rings lie wide, suggesting long growing seasons. Similar beech trees still grow in Patagonia. In a rock that looks like fired clay, Wayne finds a fossil seed head of a small reed. All these rocks, jumbled together by the glacier, are travelers in time and space.
This landscape, as spare and exposed as a stripped-down bed, bares not only the impressions of a changing climate but also the imprint of climates past.
Now Wayne points to the coast. He says, “That used to be the toe of the glacier.” It’s receded about three-quarters of a mile uphill from there, where it now melts into a new lake.
“Getting around here has really become a pain because of all the running water,” Sue tells me. “On the glacier more crevasses are opening. So we keep having to learn new routes.”
We cut straight up a little ravine with running rivulets and come out
alongside the gleaming, mile-wide glacier. After pausing for half a chocolate bar each, we step up onto the ice.
With no tufts of grass to bend over, no flowers to bow, no leaves to rustle, nothing on the land reveals the fierce wind that greets us. The wind rampaging down these slopes is gusting to at least fifty miles per hour. Wayne once came over a ridge with three colleagues and all four people blew down like bowling pins. I’m leaning so far into this wind that when I look straight forward, I’m staring at the ground. Overhead, dark clouds hurtle along at a startling pace.
Suddenly the wind drops out—complete calm—as though taking a deep breath. And now—wow—that wind blasts down the valley, snapping our coats, slapping our hoods against our heads. Ice is what Antarctica uses to freeze you; wind is what it uses to burn you.
Ragged, broken, crenellated, corrugated—the glacier is a wild whitewater river in stop-frame slow motion. My companions, they’re used to the exertion and the distances. Having unzipped everything, I’m huffing as we trudge across the glacier’s jagged surface. Even with my hat in my bare hand, my scalp is damp with sweat. We’re like toy action figures on a hyperenlarged landscape.
The sheer scale of this place is vaguely frightening. The danger, however, is real. Crevasses can be disguised, roofed over with snow. On one step, I drop just up to my thighs, but it’s quite enough to stop my heart.
Sue wheels, and reinforces. “Don’t walk on snow—step on the ice, there. You might want to just walk in our footsteps.” She doesn’t need to tell me again.
We walk ridges with yawning blue cracks up to twenty feet deep on each side of us. Far more dangerous are deep crevasses that lie thinly iced over, like pitfall traps.
All along the ice surface, dips and divots and undulations reflect light differently, here like blue shadow, there white satin, now sparkling diamonds. In the edges of the cracks are tiny spires. At eye level, minute towers, turrets, and minarets form endless little ice kingdoms. Almost every step crunches some miniature realm.
A mountainlike rock—about half a mile long and two hundred feet high—cleaves the glacier, letting us perceive the motion we cannot see. Glacial ice piles high against its uphill end like water colliding with a ship’s bow. This ship splits the glacier in two, leaving a muddied tailrace, with the glacier streaming off on either side in enormous wakes.
As the walking flattens out and eases, my heart rate returns to near normal, and I stop overheating, glad to feel cool in Antarctica. Getting off the glacier, we stop for clear water so cold we have to pause between gulps. I turn and look back. So far, so good.
On open ground not far from the ice, a skua drops to the ground only to be met and chased off by several dozen suddenly rising nesting terns. They wheel overhead, their elegantly attenuated wings and forked tails lifting them on the breeze. In Svalbard I’d seen Arctic Terns. These nearly identical polar opposites are Antarctic Terns. They’re all close relatives of the terns at Lazy Point, and sound and act in ways that help me understand that these seemingly different worlds are really just one. The unity of opposites. The unity, indeed, of everything.
Sue finds a nest with two tern eggs in it. Their warmth in a land where warmth is rare makes me ponder the path of that energy from sun to sea to flesh of bird and the excess heat that flesh affords this egg. If all things are not miraculous, “miracle” means nothing.
* * *
We need to end up on the other side of a mountain. As we’re cresting a saddle sloped across the ridgeline, a fresh blast of sea wind makes me zip my coat closed again. The landscape before us is polished bare by wind, the soil frost-heaved to a spongy texture. Trudging across this extraordinary soft bare ground earns us the commanding brink of cliffs whose jumbled ledges fall away to pounding green sea foam.
The scale is enormous in a way that landscape in peopled areas never can be. Cloud shadows continually change the distant snowfields, and the sky itself begins to look like moving ice.
“I’m glad I shall never be young,” wrote Aldo Leopold, “without wild country to be young in.” A canvas this open is a Refresh button for a spirit of any age, not just wildness to feel young in but a place to feel wild in.
We turn and head down toward the notch called Paradise Cove. We have been walking now for about three and a half hours. One end of Paradise Cove has a well-sheltered black-sand beach. Nearby lies a wallow with over a hundred bellowing behemoths packed together like logs in a raft: elephant seals. These logs wriggle over one another and snort. They have heads like enormous bowling balls, and lazily open their huge pink mouths to threaten us. Here is a comely cow, her face full of snot, inhaling the wallow’s acrid, urine-scented air with one nostril dilated round, the other closed tight. The muscles that operate that mighty nostril can shut the schnoz tight against the sea. Elephant seals dive to the unimaginable depth of four thousand feet. I imagine them surfacing far from land, after a descent to crushing pressure in frigid darkness, to take a deep breath in twenty-foot seas with freezing winds whipping so much spume across the surface that it’s hard to tell where the sea ends and the air begins.
* * *
Stark though it is, the sheltered cove is wonderfully pleasant. We unpack a couple of oranges, a couple of apples, raisins and peanuts, smoked oysters, kippered herring, grilled sausages bartered from the Polish research station—even some wine. These folks know how to rough it! We’ve brought a little firewood, too, and the exotic scent of smoke smells delightful in the Antarctic air. Around the fire, we sit on whale vertebrae the size of tree stumps, enjoying the lush life of scientists.
One imperfection in the provisions: the crackers are stale. Sue says they’re probably a couple of years old. “How come when bread goes stale it gets hard and when crackers go stale they get soft?” she asks. Ah, the imponderables. In Antarctica the spirit of inquiry ranges as wide and unbounded as the landscape.
We stroll to a high spot where Sue wants to show me the Chinstrap colony, and she suddenly says, “Wow. That’s unbelievable. They’re gone!” On several flat-topped ledges, there’s a lot of guano and the ground is well trod—but no penguins.
From where we cannot see, we hear the remnants of this colony. Down to the right, around a little bend, we see some Chinstrap Penguins on a rock.
Sue, still flabbergasted, says, “Fifteen years ago, this was all Chinstraps. They nested all along these rocks, all the way down and all the way across to those few penguins over there.”
As we start toward them, a sudden whoosh next to my head precedes a blur. Skuas have a nest nearby. Both mates zoom past us again and shoot upwind in perfect unison. With the bodies of gulls and the bearing of eagles, they can strike like a two-pound sack of sand going forty miles an hour, and people working with Wayne and Sue have been coldcocked. One look at that dark body speeding toward my head tells me I don’t need to know how it feels.
Across a bare, broad plain stands a rocky headland still plentiful with penguins. Birds coming up from the sea walk to the nest area with the undersides of their flippers blushed pink from exertion, blood flowing through translucent skin beneath translucent feathers.
Wayne says, “Look at the belly on that krill-swilling Chinny there.” A quarter of its whole body weight is krill intended for chicks. Good for that one; it’s nice to see such thriving success. May its chicks be many.
Fluffy gray-and-white chicks three-quarters of the adults’ height look like downy Buddhas, their center of gravity so low they couldn’t possibly fall over.
Penguins look as tough as footballs, and when you see them trying to claw their way up a wet cliff in the breakers and getting bounced around, you understand that they actually are that tough. Their feathering is so densely packed, you’d have difficulty working a small finger in to find out how thick it is. It’s thick. They can take a pounding. And they can give it. Wing bones as flat as blades can slap hard, and a bite can raise a palm-sized bruise. Wayne tells of prying open the beak of a penguin that was biting Sue, only to have it
clamp on him. Then Sue prying it off, only to have it bite her. Like peanut butter, with jaws.
Wayne and Sue need food samples from five penguins. We select a volunteer from the incoming adults. No one likes this part. Wayne inserts the soft rounded end of a clear plastic hose down the gullet of our detained penguin. The tube must go carefully past the bird’s tongue and palate—which bristle with krill-holding backward-pointed barbs—and behind the trachea’s airway.
The tube is connected to a warm-water bag; with Wayne raising the bag and Sue holding the penguin upright, water flows into the penguin by gravity. When the penguin gargles a little, Sue inverts it, one hand around its legs and the other supporting its body. Sue massages it, saying, “Hey, buddy, don’t look so sad. Give it up easy and you’re on your way home.” Then with the aid of Sue’s finger, the penguin’s precious krill spills in a big gushing rush into a white plastic pan.
Wayne says, “It is not pretty, but in the old days, people killed them to get food samples. That was awful.”
* * *
As soon as we’ve got our five samples, the temperature drops sharply. A gray sky, pregnant with snow, begins shedding flecks. I raise my hood, then fumble to get my gloves on in a hurry. Wind gusts are suddenly raising white tornadoes of water that shatter in the air. The weather decides for us: time to go.
* * *
After the day’s rugged round-trip, I feel wiped out, but a round of “barley sandwiches” (read: home-brewed beer) and some brownies from the oven fortify us to start processing the krill samples. On the kitchen table, Wayne and Sue weigh the whole sample from each bird. The stomach contents average about 600 to 800 grams—roughly a pound and a half—and are almost all krill. With incense burning to mask the scent, and music playing, the hut smells and sounds like a college dorm. Next, we measure the length of fifty krill from each stomach. The krill, of several species, are nearly all mature creatures, and you can see the little orange dot in the midsection that says most are female. These are spawners.