Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  2

  The March of the Penguins

  David Ainley looked like an ageing surfer dude, or a mountaineer who had spent a little too much time squinting into the sun and wind. He was in his early sixties and had been coming to Antarctica for ever. He had an untamed shock of white hair, a heavily tanned face, a moustache that he keeps when he’s off the ice, and a beard that was here just for the season. I had been warned that he wasn’t so good with people. ‘Taciturn’ was how some had described him to me, and ‘a bit wild’. He spends as much time as possible out here in his field camp, among his penguins, and as little as he can back in Mactown.1

  David was Californian, a biologist from an ecological consultancy in San Jose. He spoke slowly and hesitantly, as if he couldn’t quite remember how you’re supposed to talk to other humans. Sometimes he put invisible inverted commas around his words and pronounced long ones in an exaggerated way as if he were making some kind of joke. He often was making some kind of joke. I liked him immediately.

  He pulled on his coat as I entered the main research tent.

  ‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘Let’s see how many smiling faces greet us.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Penguins are always smiling. They have no self-doubt.’

  We stomped out of the tent in our bunny boots and headed down towards the sea. David’s camp at Cape Royds was a short helicopter ride from McMurdo, on the westernmost tip of Ross Island, and was home to a colony of Adélie penguins. They are classic cartoon creatures, knee-high, with black heads, flippers and backs, white throats and chests, and a bright white ring around their eyes. They are pathologically busy, packing their entire breeding cycle into the brief Antarctic summer. Adélies are also cute and comical. And everybody, but everybody, loves them.

  I, however, did not. Even before I met them I was already tired of penguins. From the moment I started to talk about Antarctica to my friends and family I began to receive a mountain of penguin paraphernalia. There were penguin T-shirts, penguin cards, penguin jigsaw puzzles, cups, mugs, glasses, playing cards, a penguin apron, penguin pyjamas. For birthdays, Christmases, or for no particular reason I received penguin backpacks, pencils, rulers, scarves, gloves, big furry penguins, small furry penguins, penguin place mats and cutlery. When I outlawed penguin presents they still came in. ‘It’s just a small one. I couldn’t resist.’

  Well, I could, quite happily, and I was determined to resist the charms of the real Antarctic thing. Penguins are the clichés of Antarctica, annoyingly cute icons of a continent that is otherwise wild and vast and mysterious. I saw them as our way of diminishing the ice; we anthropomorphise them, personify them, imagine them to be amusing little people, and in the process we bring the continent down to a manageable human scale. I hated that idea. So although I love animals in general, I had told my friends and I had told myself that I would not, repeat not, fall in love with these creatures. I would write about penguins because there was interesting science to tell. That was all.

  It was a gorgeous day, barely below freezing, with a bright sun reflecting off the sea ice that was crammed up against the shore. Most of the ground was bare volcanic rock, and Mount Erebus’s bulk dominated the scene, topped with its customary cloud.

  David told me that Adélies choose to settle their colonies in rocky places—to keep their eggs safe from ice—and those that are also close enough to the sea to enable them to fish for food. But although we were looking down on to McMurdo Sound, there was no open water between here and the horizon, just endless sea ice that had been squeezed into ridges and scattered chunks as if a giant child had thrown toy blocks out of its pram. A fat Weddell seal had hauled itself out of a crack in the distance. Seven Adélies were making their arduous way back, stumbling and falling flat in the gaps between ice chunks, scrabbling with their flippers to pull them through. It looked hard. There was still a fair way to go before they reached the rocks, and then another stiff climb uphill to the colony proper.

  We passed a small pond half clear of ice with a running stream spilling out over the rocks, the edges scattered with white eggshells. And then we reached the colony, and the noise raised itself from a rumour to a roar; it sounded unhinged, like a cackling orchestra of kazoos. The fishy guano smell was noticeable, but not nearly as strong as I had been expecting. Although the nests were densely packed on the ground, I supposed in this big open spot there was enough wind to whisk the ranker smells away.

  By contrast with the bustling birds heading to and from the sea ice, the ones on the nests were placid, and even listless. Every so often one stood up, stretched and flapped its wings, revealing the bare pink patch on its belly that fitted neatly over the eggs, skin to shell, to ensure that maximum warmth reached the chicks inside. David told me that they would usually lay two eggs apiece but this year there had been quite a few single clutches.

  A skua landed and started prowling. It looked like a seagull but larger and brown with a wickedly curving beak like a hawk. I’d seen skuas at McMurdo, and been warned that they would snatch a sandwich from your hand if you let them. They are scavengers, always out for an opportunity to harass, bully or steal. This one was clearly eyeing up the eggs. The nearest penguins stretched their necks menacingly like guard geese ready to hiss. They shuffled round, keeping their eggs out of sight beneath them, maintaining eye contact with the enemy.

  ‘Why doesn’t the skua just attack?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s afraid of the penguins, with good cause,’ said David. ‘Skuas may stand as tall as penguins but they are all air and feathers. They only weigh maybe nine hundred or a thousand grams. The penguins are much denser—they can weigh seven or eight kilograms. And those flippers are very hard. A whack from one of those and a skua definitely remembers it.’

  That doesn’t stop them from looking for a quick thieving chance. While our skua was getting nowhere, a burst of indignant squawking erupted to our right and another bird flew overhead, barely able to hold the outsized egg in its beak. The penguins settled back down on their nests. There was no sign of where the egg had been taken from. Everyone seemed resigned.

  Now in mid-December, the Adélies were almost halfway through their race against time. Each year they must pack every relationship stage of meeting, wooing, mating, hatching, rearing and weaning their young into the few short months of the summer season.

  They come here in early November at the start of the southern summer and hastily reconvene with last year’s partners. There is little time wasted on courting niceties or on excessive fidelity. If you’re a day or two late, your former mate will already be on to someone else. The first eggs come about a week later, and by two weeks most of them are laid.

  The penguins are fat when they first arrive, having stocked up on fish for the season. As soon as she has laid her eggs the female heads back to open water to replenish, and the male incubates the eggs and keeps the skuas at bay. If he’s lucky, she’ll be back within two weeks to relieve him.

  For the first few weeks after hatching, at least one parent will stay with the chick. But when the chicks are bigger and more demanding, both parents will go off to feed at the same time, saving some fish for themselves and regurgitating the rest into their offsprings’ gaping gullets. By now, the chicks will probably be in a crèche, kept safe by adults that are hanging around or still tending nests. When they are seven or eight weeks old the chicks will lose their soft brown down to reveal a grown-up blue and white penguin suit that will soon turn black. From the first week of February they will head for the sea and be on their own.

  Released from their duties, the parents will feed voraciously for a few weeks to regain their fat reserves. Then they will haul out on sea ice floes and moult. This is apparently the one time these little penguins do not smile. David told me that when they’re moulting they don’t like to be touched. They just sit there, he said, scowling, wanting no other penguins anywhere near, until they have lost their old plumage and grown a new one. And then, as the first fin
gers of winter touch the continent, they will head north. Not too far, though, for they are true Antarcticans. They may retreat a little, to the edge of the open water to wait out the winter, but they never leave the ice. And then, at the start of spring, they return loyally to the exact same nesting spot, to start all over again.

  At least, that was what normally happened. But the past few years had been challenging ones for the Adélies of Ross Island. In March 2000 a massive chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf broke off to create one of the largest icebergs ever seen. Though it subsequently broke into several pieces, the biggest of these—called B15a2—still measured more than a hundred miles long, and was larger than the state of Delaware.

  B15a wedged itself across much of the mouth of McMurdo Sound, blocking the route back from the penguins’ winter homes to their summer nesting spots with a giant white cliff. The only options were to turn left and head to the massive colony at Cape Crozier, on Ross Island’s eastern side, or to turn right, double back on yourself for miles, and then round a corner and find the way here to Cape Royds. Crozier was by far the easier route.

  So what did they do? Thanks to the activities of David and his colleagues, many of the penguins in both colonies wore bands on their flippers, marking who they were and where they were born. That turned out to be the perfect opportunity to find out how loyal they really were to their place of birth. And much to David’s surprise the answer was . . . not very. Royds banded birds had been showing up at Cape Bird, thirteen miles away, and even at Cape Crozier, which was forty miles from where they were supposed to be. Very few had gone the opposite way.

  ‘This has rewritten the book on immigration and emigration,’ said David. ‘Adélies were supposed to be highly philopatric—religiously returning to the colony where they were born. But now we know that their behaviour is much more pliable than we thought.’

  That was great—in a way. But the megaberg brought a darker side, too. The sea ice would normally break up during the summer, but the gigantic cliffs of B15a had encouraged it to stay around. Adélie colonies are usually within a kilometre of open water, to enable the parents to forage for food quickly and easily, since they can swim much faster than they can walk. But thanks to the iceberg, sea ice now stretched farther than we could see.

  And the Adélies were suffering. ‘There are so few birds,’ said David. ‘You’d normally have non-breeding birds or practising juveniles to chase the skuas away, but there’s nobody this year younger than four, and lots of birds who had been trying to breed have now abandoned their nests.’

  He went off to check who was still here, stepping carefully between the nests, stopping to make pencil notes in an orange notebook. Then he beckoned me over in delight to see the first chick of the season. Above the background cackling there was suddenly a racket that to my inexpert ear sounded like some kind of territorial challenge. But David beamed and said, ‘That’s a returning partner ready to take over.’ Much cawing and squawking followed; the two penguins threw their heads up into the air and opened their beaks operatically wide, and then snaked their sinuous necks around one another, to the left, and the right, and the left, and the right. Then, in a heavily choreographed move, the one on the nest stepped aside and the new one immediately shuffled in to take over. The eggs beneath were visible for a bare second or two; they were a little larger than duck eggs and just off-white. The returning female settled down, stood up, shuffled the two eggs around, and sat down again. Her relieved mate hung around for a few moments, picking up a few stones and adding them to the nest.

  ‘Stones are penguin currency,’ David said. ‘They are a prime factor in an Adélie penguin’s self-esteem.’ They are important because they keep the eggs high and dry, free from any meltwater that might run by. If the temperature just topped the freezing point, snow could melt. But the water would quickly freeze again, and if it were touching an egg, the chick inside would freeze, too. The bigger your pile of stones, the safer your eggs, and the more you can thrust out your chest and trumpet and crow to the penguins around you. Stones are the penguin equivalent of designer brands or fast cars. They are the outward, in-your-face signs of success. ‘Once penguins have accumulated a big pile they become very possessive. They will steal stones and squabble over them. There’s no chance to replace stolen stones when the skuas are around—you have to sit tight and wait for your mate. So every time there’s a nest relief the outgoing bird is supposed to find new stones to add to the pile.’

  Our newly relieved male made a few half-hearted efforts. Normally he would stick around for an hour doing this, but this one was woefully skinny beside his plump partner. After just a few minutes, he turned and headed off to the slope that led down to the sea ice.

  We watched him go. ‘This experiment with the iceberg was made to order,’ said David. ‘But now it’s getting old.’

  Between David’s tent and the penguin colony, a wooden hut rose incongruously on the rocks. Its outer walls had been bleached blond by the sun and the scouring effect of dirt and wind. Inside, as for the other Antarctic huts of the heroic age, it looked almost new, but the furnishings were old-fashioned enough to give it a historic air. There was a dual portrait on the wall of King George V looking regally to the side, and his consort Queen Mary staring out into the hut. On one side was a wood-burning stove and oven, with a metal chimney. The shelves still bore slightly rusty tins of food whose antique lettering declared their contents: ‘Kippered Herring’, ‘Pure Preserved Cabbage’, ‘Irish Brawn’.

  This last could also have aptly referred to the leader of the expedition that built this hut, the boss himself, Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton was born and initially brought up in Ireland, and, although he moved to England at the age of ten, to a private school that raised true sons of the British Empire, he never quite lost his Irish brogue. His snooty fellow pupils mocked him for his background, but he knew how to hold his own. One friend said of him: ‘If there was a scrap, he was usually in it.’3

  Back in 1902, Shackleton had been part of Captain Scott’s Discovery expedition, for which the first hut had been built at Hut Point. Scott had chosen Shackleton as one of the two men to join him on the first ever attempt to reach the South Pole. But the journey was poorly planned and the outcome woeful. All three explorers ended up suffering from scurvy, and they barely managed to drag their overburdened sledges nearly five hundred kilometres from base before having to turn back. Scott knew that Shackleton was liked and respected and somehow seemed a threat to his authority. He was also looking for someone to blame for the fiasco. He declared that Shackleton was medically unfit for duty and ordered him home.

  This new attempt on the Pole, which Shackleton had cobbled together using a tiny ship called the Nimrod, was his response to that earlier humiliation. It was vital that he succeed, particularly as Scott had been livid when he heard that Shackleton was now striking out on his own.

  The contrast between the two men was marked. Scott was a commissioned officer in His Majesty’s Royal Navy; Shackleton—whose physician father could not afford to send him into the Navy—had learned his seamanship in the less prestigious Merchant Navy. Scott was formal; Shackleton was charismatic. Scott drew a strict division between officers and men; Shackleton had an open-plan attitude to the architecture of leadership.

  So much was clear inside the hut that Shackleton built here at Cape Royds, where he arrived in February 1908. Every man was treated equally, and given his own space. The edges of the hut were divided into two-man cubicles, 400 square feet, each with a suitable nickname. One was so immaculate, with such highbrow books along its shelves, that it was dubbed ‘1 Park Lane’, then the smartest address in London; another was crudely called ‘The Taproom’ since one of its occupants suffered chronically from diarrhoea; still another, which belonged to the two scientists and contained a jumble of bizarre instruments and devices, was ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’.

  Shackleton was the only occupant of the hut who had a room to himself. But that was as much
because he knew that the men sometimes needed to kick loose away from their leader as because he wanted privacy. Throughout the winter of 1908, the hut was a happy one. The boss may have had a quick temper, but it passed just as quickly. More importantly he had the knack of making everyone feel they were uniquely essential to the mission.

  With the return of summer, on 29 October 1908, in brilliant sunshine and under a cloudless sky, Shackleton set out in pursuit of his dream. He was accompanied by three chosen companions, a support party, a motor tractor and a set of Siberian ponies each gamely pulling a load.

  The motor tractor was soon struggling on the uneven surface of the great Barrier, and the ponies did not fare much better. But still the explorers marched on. The support crew deposited food and supplies for the return journey, and then on 7 November they left to return to Cape Royds. Shackleton and the three remaining men passed Scott’s previous furthest point south with ease, and soon they were witnessing something no human had ever seen. They had reached the end of the flat white plain of the Great Ice Barrier, and in front of them rose a range of magnificent mountains. The four men climbed up one of the smaller mountains, which they named Mount Hope, to spy out the land. ‘There burst upon our vision an open road to the South,’ Shackleton wrote. They had discovered a vast gleaming glacier, which he called the Beardmore Glacier after one of the expedition’s wealthy sponsors. This would be their staircase south, up on to the great plateau of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

  However, as they laboured up the glacier, and began to suffer from the high altitude they were attaining, Shackleton realised that their progress was worryingly slow. He had calculated their food based on achieving nineteen miles a day, but they were barely managing five.

  Up on the plateau, the conditions grew worse. On Christmas Day one of the party, Frank Wild, wrote in his diary: ‘May none but my worst enemies ever spend their Xmas in such a dreary God forsaken spot as this. Here we are 9500 feet above sea level, farther away from civilization than any human being has ever been . . . with half a gale blowing, and drift snow flying, and a temperature of 52 degrees of frost.’4