The helicopter takes off with a blast of wind and snow from its blades, leaving me and Max, the field assistant assigned to me by the New Zealand Antarctic Research Program, alone at the hut. Three companions from the University of Canterbury will join me in a few weeks, but until then, safety protocols dictate that there needs to be a minimum of two in any field party. Max is an experienced mountaineer; a man of actions but few words. He is my equivalent of the Laplander that accompanied Borchgrevink: a human safety device. He is there to ensure that I survive, not to help with the science.
I leave Max to figure out how to crank the heater up and head off to inspect the bare penguin colony. The penguins, which migrate north during the Antarctic winter, have yet to arrive. That is, with the exception, as it turns out, of a dozen individuals, almost certainly all males, which to my delight I find waddling up the beach and over the open areas of snow and guano-stained earth looking for their nest sites. Cape Bird is about 435 miles south of Cape Adare and, consequently, the Adelie penguins arrive here to breed later than those such as the one shown to the dying Nicolai Hanson.
Like Hanson, I am delighted by the sight of the first penguin. I am decked out in my padded yellow survival clothes with thick-soled mukluk boots. The first penguin I encounter comes up to my knees, a perfect picture of contrasts. Black-and-white. To the penguin, I must look like a giant yellow blob, a man mountain, if not a man of the mountains like Max.
It is love at first sight. At least for me. Until that moment, penguins represented nothing more to me than a ticket to the Antarctic. Yet, there is something in the attitude of this first penguin I encounter, more so than anything cute about its looks, that leaves me smitten. The penguin is so determined, so gritty, and as at home in this cold place as I am a stranger. I stand in its path but it is not afraid of me; nor will it alter its course because of my appearance. It stops, stretches out its flippers, fluffs out the feathers on its chest, and shakes its head. Drops of a clear kind of penguin snot fly out from the tip of its beak. But it does not retreat nor bow its head. If I represent a threat, it does not care; it seems to care only about one thing: the route along which it has chosen to move; the route that will presumably lead to breeding and success in an environment where I would flounder in minutes were it not for all the technology I wore in the form of my yellow clothing and big boots. Everything about the penguin says that it belongs here and I do not.
I move aside. It is me who bows. I bow to this little creature newly returned from the sea in its starkly colored outfit; the white feathers on its chest gleaming in the late evening sunlight. At that moment a fire is lit inside me that has yet to go out; a desire to understand everything about this black-and-white penguin and the world in which it lives. That moment is every bit as significant for me as the one that had lit a fire inside the seventeen-year-old Roald Amundsen the day he watched Fridtjof Nansen travel up the fjord to Kristiania. I could have described it similarly:
All my boyhood’s dreams reawoke to tempestuous life. For the first time something in my secret thoughts whispered clearly and tremulously: if you could make an Antarctic penguin biologist!
It is while at the Fram Museum in Oslo that I come within touching distance of Roald Amundsen’s boyhood dreams or, rather, the vehicle for potentially realizing them. An underground passage takes me to another building containing another wooden ship—although this one is shockingly small, hardly deserving of the designation “ship” at all. I walk down its length: it takes me just twenty-seven paces, but it is its narrowness that makes it seem so small, so sleek; just five or six paces across its width. It is quite strikingly colored in dark green, red, and black, with a rudimentary looking mainsail and a long bowsprit that can take three head sails. At its rear there is a propeller that looks ridiculously small, and yet what it represents is huge: onboard I find the room housing the engine that powers it. It is the first motor to have ever been put in a Norwegian ship.
The Gjoa has a definite elegance to it: if this were a person, I would liken it to a ballet dancer, lean and agile. I can see with my own eyes why Amundsen chose this little ship to attempt to “make the North West Passage” in responding to his own secret thoughts.
It is September 12, 1903. Roald Amundsen moors the Gjoa in a natural harbor on the southeast coast of King William Island in the Canadian Arctic, about halfway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, about halfway to completing the oft-attempted but never-completed Northwest Passage. It is fifty-seven years to the day since Sir John Franklin and the Erebus and Terror became beset in ice not so very far away as they attempted the same. Amundsen christens the harbor Gjoahaven. He cannot know that on the opposite side of the island, in Terror Bay, sits the Terror itself—it will take another 113 years before it is found—while its sister ship, the Erebus, also lies nearby.
The Northwest Passage is not Amundsen’s only goal. One focus of his expedition is to get to the Magnetic North Pole. Amundsen calculates that it is only some ninety miles from Gjoahaven, hence, this seems like the perfect place to winter over and stage a sledging trip to the Magnetic North Pole the following spring. The harbor is protected, the surrounding land is not too steep, there are two streams bringing fresh water, and there are ample reindeer and geese for food—at least before the winter sets in.
As it turns out, Amundsen will spend two winters at Gjoahaven. Yet there is an upside in all this for a man intent on being a polar explorer. During his two-year encampment on King William Island, Amundsen befriends the local Inuit, a tribe known as Netsiliks. From them, he learns firsthand how to build igloos, how to use dogs, and the importance of eating meat to ward off scurvy. It all reinforces the lessons he experienced on the Belgica: that being well prepared is the only means to ensure survival and success in the world’s harshest and coldest climates. It is the Netsiliks who show him how to do that.
What the Netsiliks do not show the man who professed on the Belgica to prefer ice to women is anything about the ways of sex. However, some of his men do fraternize with the Inuit women, despite their leader admonishing them not to do so, and even father children.
Even so, in the oral traditions of the Netsiliks, a line of them are sired by the tall Norwegian with the big nose.
Geir Kløver, the director of the Fram Museum, is as straightforward and no-nonsense as it is possible for a person to be. I get the impression that it pains him to smile. However, his oval face, topped with short, cropped hair, cracks into something approximating a grin when I ask him about Amundsen’s purported Inuit children. He is adamant that there is no evidence for them and that it conflicts with Amundsen’s admonition to his men to avoid fornicating with the natives. Underscoring all this, DNA evidence has revealed absolutely none of Amundsen’s blood in the line of Inuit supposedly descended from him.
In September 1903, as Amundsen settles into a winter in Gjoahaven, alone in his bed, to await his attempt to get to the Magnetic North Pole, oddly enough, at the other end of the world, Robert Falcon Scott is at that moment preparing to set out on an attempt to reach the Magnetic South Pole. After Scott has been forced to spend a second winter in Antarctica because the Discovery has remained stuck in the ice at Hut Point, he and six others depart for the Magnetic South Pole, man-hauling their sleds. During the seventy-three-day trip they fail to reach their goal, but Scott and two of the others become the first humans to get up onto the Antarctic Plateau. Their critical achievement is that they make reasonably good distances each day by pulling their sleds: it is enough to cement Scott’s aversion to using dogs and to reinforce his belief that the best way to travel in the Antarctic is by man-hauling.
The previous summer, while Scott, Wilson, and Shackleton had been trying, in vain, to get to the South Pole, others from his expedition had made a trip to Cape Crozier at the eastern end of Ross Island. There they discovered an Emperor penguin colony. Consequently, while Scott is heading off in one direction to seek the Magnetic South Pole, Wilson puts on his hat as the expedition’s zoo
logist and heads in the opposite direction to Cape Crozier to study the penguins.
As well as being the site of a large colony of Adelie penguins, Cape Crozier is also the most southern breeding place in the world for Emperor penguins, the largest of all penguins. More striking to Wilson than the size difference between the two species, however, is his observation that while the Adelies are sitting on eggs and taking advantage of the relatively benign conditions of the Antarctic summer in which to breed, the large size of the Emperors’ accompanying chicks—which are almost ready to fledge—suggest that the Emperor penguins must breed, unbelievably, during the horrifically cold and completely dark Antarctic winter. As improbable as that seems, Wilson is forced to accept the evidence before him:
. . . we find the Emperor penguin hatching out its chicks in the coldest month of the whole Antarctic year, when the mean temperature for the month is eighteen degrees below zero, Farenheit, and the minimum may fall to minus sixty-eight, I think we may rightly consider the bird to be eccentric.
Penguins were proving to be eccentric in more ways than one.
It is 1980, and I am at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, where I have gone to study for a PhD. While there, I am simultaneously writing up the results of my penguin research for a master of science degree from the University of Canterbury—the research that I had come up with at the last minute to get me to Antarctica.
I had begun my three-and-a-half-month stint in Antarctica by monitoring the penguin nests in six breeding groups—subcolonies—of the Adelie penguins at Cape Bird. Up till then, studies had determined breeding success and failure by monitoring the penguins’ nests every five days or so. If the eggs or chicks in a nest disappeared within a five-day interval, this was typically put down to either predation by skuas or loss due to unknown causes. Skuas are large gull-like birds that set up territories around penguin colonies and try to pilfer as many eggs and chicks as they can, instead of going to sea in search of their usual diet of fish.
In contrast to those previous studies, I mapped out each nest site and inspected every nest and determined its contents every day. I would stand outside the subcolony and wait until I could see the eggs or chicks within each nest. I carried a long bamboo pole so, if necessary, I could gently raise the penguin’s bum to peak at the eggs. Typically, this technique was not needed once the chicks hatched as they were more easily seen. I also set up a tent on the ridge above the subcolonies from which I could make additional observations. And I could also monitor the nests with binoculars from the window of the hut’s lab itself.
Through these much more intensive observations, I was able to ascertain accurately when predation occurred. However, I also saw that in many cases, the eggs were simply abandoned by a parent bird before being taken by skuas.
It is while analyzing my data in Edmonton that I begin to appreciate something new, even eccentric, about the penguins. Yes, predation by skuas is a major cause of breeding failure but, in many ways, the penguins are their own worst enemies. Almost as many eggs and chicks are lost because penguin pairs fail to coordinate their nest relief.
A female Adelie penguin will typically lay two eggs, three days apart. However, the eggs are large and they need to be incubated for just over a month before the embryos have developed enough to hatch as chicks. Penguins must get their sustenance from the sea, yet they must breed upon land. Consequently, while parents are in attendance at their nests, they are on a diet; they must fast.
An Adelie penguin at the start of the breeding season weighs in, fighting fit, at around eleven pounds. As one parent must constantly be on the nest to keep the eggs and young chicks warm, not to mention to protect them from the ever-vigilant skuas that are after a cheap meal, there is no way that an eleven-pound bird can manage to do all the incubating by itself; no way that an eleven-pound bird can go without food in the Antarctic for the entire incubation period. And that does not include the additional two weeks they are on shore for courtship before even starting incubation. Consequently, the only way for Adelie penguins to breed successfully is for pairs of penguins to coordinate their nest attendance patterns so that one is always on the nest while allowing the other to be away at sea feeding.
Analyzing my data shows that the male Adelie penguins arrive at the subcolonies to breed usually a little before the females. Males and females engage in a courtship period that lasts about twelve days and involves a fair amount of the lovemaking that so excited Borchgrevink’s men. Once the female has laid both eggs, however, she takes off to sea, leaving the male to incubate the eggs for about two weeks. When she gets back, it is the male’s turn to go to sea to feed for an extended period, which may also last for about two weeks. Thereafter, the pair takes turns on the nest at much more frequent intervals, typically trading places every one to three days. When the chicks are around two to three weeks old, they clump together with other chicks in their subcolony, forming crèches, at which point both parents can be away from the nest at the same time to get food for their chicks and themselves.
Survival analysis is a statistical technique used in medical research to measure time to death and identify critical periods of risk for patients. It has never previously been applied to penguins, but the detailed nature of my data allows me to use it to examine the causes of breeding failure in my penguins. This analysis shows that the risk from skuas is fairly constant throughout the life of an egg or young chick, but there are two periods of extraordinarily high risk of death due to other factors. When eggs are around eighteen days of age, the risk that a parent will desert them is enormously high. Similarly, when chicks are four to six days of age, there is a really high risk that they will starve to death.
As bizarre as that sounds, it makes perfect sense when matched with my detailed records of the nest attendance patterns of pairs at each nest. Normally, a female takes about two weeks at sea after egg-laying, but if she does not return in time, her male partner will have little in reserve to continue fasting and incubating. A fasting male loses just under two ounces in body weight each day, mostly through burning its fat reserves. From another facet of my work, I have shown that about thirty days without food is all that most males can tolerate before their fat reserves are reduced to such low levels that they have go to sea to feed themselves or risk their own survival. Given that the average courtship period for the males was twelve days, this leaves about eighteen days that they could sustain incubation without being relieved. Indeed, my nest attendance records reveal that the high risk posed to eggs at eighteen days of age is a consequence of their mothers not returning from the sea in time to relieve their fasting and, by then, very skinny fathers.
However, penguin offspring still have every reason to fear their fathers as much as their mothers. Given that a female has just replenished her fat reserves when taking her turn incubating, she is unlikely to be troubled by any extra fasting needed to cope with a tardy male, but a big problem arises because the chicks will hatch when the eggs are about thirty-three days old. If the mother has not been relieved, she will have no fresh food in her belly to regurgitate to her hungry chicks. I discover a previous study, carried out in the 1960s in a time before ethics committees scrutinized research proposals: it shows that penguin chicks deprived of food can survive unfed for four to six days by utilizing the remains of the yolk sac they have retained from being an embryo in the egg.
In other words, the huge risk to the survival of Adelie penguin chicks at four to six days of age comes about because they have never been fed since the time they hatched. Indeed, my nest attendance patterns show exactly that: chicks starving to death at four to six days of age do so in nests where their fathers have not returned from feeding at sea to relieve their mothers.
Perhaps the craziest, most eccentric thing I discover that winter, as I sit at my desk in the redbrick Biological Science Building, poring over numbers written in pencil on graph paper with a calculator at my fingertips (this is in a time before personal computers), is
that successful pairs of Adelie penguin parents have complementary nest attendance patterns. That is, if a female is away for a longer than normal time while the male takes the first incubation duties, he will go away to feed for a shorter than normal time, even though, by all rights, because he has fasted for longer and used up more of his fat reserves, he might be expected to go for longer.
This raises two questions for me. Could it mean that successful penguins are responding to some sort of internal timer that tells them when their eggs are nearly done and that it is time to head back to the nest with food for their chicks? And, irrespective of that, shouldn’t it give an advantage to any aspect of their mating behavior that ensures penguins are more likely to end up with a complementary partner?
I look out my window at the snow-covered ground and the dark, leafless trees lining the Saskatchewan River. It is not quite as black-and-white a world as that of the penguins, but the wan winter light of Edmonton seems to be reflecting the world of my thoughts as shades of gray. I have uncovered more questions than I have found answers. Perhaps all that fighting among the mating penguins that Borchgrevink and his men enjoyed so much has a purpose after all?
My doctoral thesis at the University of Alberta is on ground squirrels not penguins. One of my advisors is in the anthropology department and that brings to my attention one of her colleagues: forensic anthropologist, Associate Professor Owen Beattie.
A Polar Affair Page 7
