PENGUINS, PENGUINS EVERYWHERE
SALISBURY PLAIN, SOUTH GEOR
King penguins line the shore GIA alongside fur seals, but a few hundred yards up from the beach is one of the most spectacular sights in the world.
The rookery is home to nearly half a million of them. As you approach, some in their penguin finery stand by watching like an attentive maître d’. Others are too busy preening, feeding their young, fighting with the neighbours, chasing the annoyingly precocious juvenile, sitting on eggs, or mating. They waddle past the fur seal pups and occasionally take a poke at them, because there’s nothing more curious than a seal pup — except maybe a penguin chick.
It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen, experienced, or even imagined — and I’ve thought about penguins for most of my life. I became enamoured as a child. My favourite ornaments in my grandmother’s rather large collection were a pair of penguins that I was allowed to look at, but not touch. I know now that they were kings, with the distinctive yellow patches on their heads, necks and beaks.
I’ve watched plenty of documentaries and seen hundreds of photos of rookeries. But I also know enough about how to crop a photograph or frame a video shot to exaggerate the numbers.
So, I never imagined this. I couldn’t have imagined this. Everywhere you look it seems there are birds posing. And almost as far as you can see across the rookery, it’s chock-ablock with penguins.
A 40-minute hike up a mountain gives the most extraordinary perspective. For nearly 180 degrees below, it’s all black and white. All penguins.
Every single one of us was completely astonished and awed. That included: John Dudenay, who has been coming to the Antarctic for 50 years, first as a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey and later as its director; Tony Martin, the University of Dundee professor who led the effort to rid the island of rats; the ship’s naturalist Simon Boyes; and Ocean Wise CEO John Nightingale, who has been here before.
Two doctoral students who are travelling with us in order to do a penguin census for Oceanites were the first on shore, moving carefully amongst the rookery. It will take a while for them to determine exactly how many there are. They manually count about 6,000 or 7,000, and then take photographs so that they can count the rest using a grid.
The rookery is as noisy and stinky as any overcrowded city. The parents travel up to several hundred kilometres to find food for their chicks. The preferred food is lanternfish, but they also eat squid and krill, which are found at depths of up to 300 metres.
Once they locate their chicks on return, they regurgitate it. The food transfer doesn’t always go smoothly, which accounts for the red patches on the bare soil. Apparently, penguins don’t abide by any five-second rule — once it’s dropped, it’s forgotten.
There are traffic jams on penguin highways, and with this many birds, someone is always wanting to get to the sea or get home to feed the kids.
The cacophony of screams, hoots, chatter and mewling is how they find one another. It’s how the parents, who share the rearing, find their chicks because, heaven knows in this harsh Antarctic climate, there is no altruism. They feed only their own chicks.
They are also unique among the species. King penguins are not monogamous. There’s no time for that. It takes more than a year to raise a chick. The eggs are laid in the Antarctic summer, which begins in November. Incubation takes 54 days, and then its winter.
Late-hatched chicks can’t survive even with their brown downy coats that look like mini-buffalo hides thrown over them, or even huddled together in their crèches. The chicks are forced to fast throughout a winter that gets bitterly cold.
Polar weather is more fickle than most other places on Earth. As we’ve experienced, it can be sunny one minute and before the cloud covers it, sleet will be pelting and pinging any exposed skin.
Because this is a conservation area — there are no permanent human residents on the island — there are lots of rules for visitors. The hardest one to comply with is staying five metres away from the penguins because just when you think you’re at the right distance, one will pop up behind you, or a curious one comes waddling up to take a closer look at you. But it’s advice worth heeding because despite their looks, they can be quite aggressive and their bites can result in nasty infections.
It’s so easy to anthropomorphize these birds. There’s one grumbling by like an old man hurrying to meet his pals at the pub. There are the groups standing at the water’s edge mumbling among themselves about who is going to go in first because they know all too well that danger lurks in the water in the form of leopard seals and orcas.
To have never seen one in the wild before this trip — and now to have seen them in greater number than is possible to fully process — made this one of the most exhilarating and thrilling days of my life.