A Polar Affair

by Lloyd Spencer Davis

  The instructions say more about Levick than any letters after his name might have. Untrained as a scientist, he nevertheless possesses the mind and methodology of a scientist. It is one that he had already displayed when studying brucellosis in the Mediterranean, and, it is married to a heart filled with respect for his study animals and their welfare.

  Yes, he kills seals and penguins for their meat; but that is a regrettable necessity in his mind. What he cannot abide is inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals. And certainly not for fun. In that regard, he is the polar opposite of Per Savio and Carsten Borchgrevink. Causing animals to suffer does not bring him amusement and he thinks much less of the men who would perpetrate what he calls the “scene of tragedy I saw.”

  In addition to his objectivity, Levick’s Zoological Notes reveal that he sets up the sort of experimental observation that is not just years ahead of its time, but decades.

  He selects two small subcolonies (using the terms common in his day, he refers to them as “colonies”), “each with about fifty couples, for special observation.” He marks the subcolonies with red flags on bamboos “so that they shall be in no way interfered with by any of our party collecting eggs etc.” The first subcolony, he calls Group A. It lies on a small rounded knoll surrounded on three sides by a shallow lake that is beginning to thaw. “Being isolated from the main crowd,” he suggests, “it will be easy to watch them specially, and get to know habits and characteristics of the various couples individually.” What’s more, he foreshadows my study seventy-three years later by marking the breasts of five pairs in Group A with bright red paint. One of the supposed pairs turns out not to be a pair: instead, each has its own partner. This makes six nests in all where at least one of the pair is marked individually. Levick is not finished yet. He marks each of their nests with large stones on which he writes the number of the nest: one through six. In addition, there is an easily identifiable injured bird in a nest on the periphery of Group A, and so he includes that nest also as part of his intended, detailed systematic observations.

  The experimental protocol at the second subcolony, Group B, is not so well thought through. Rather than decades ahead of its time, it reflects more the Victorian attitude to studying nature: that nothing beats collecting and killing. This subcolony is situated near the meteorological screen and, again, Levick marks the breasts of several pairs in it. However, this time his “intention is to remove all the eggs from this group as they are layed (sic).” He takes four away that are present on the first day and he seems well pleased that, “A couple of minutes after I removed the eggs, the owners seemed to have forgotten the incident entirely.” He may well have been trying to determine whether the birds would re-lay (a common feature of some birds that lose an egg soon after it is laid) but, really, such a manipulation on such a large scale was always going to cause massive disturbance. Perhaps for this reason, Group B does not feature much at all in his Zoological Notes.

  Of course, when Murray Levick finds himself, the reluctant penguin biologist, standing on Ridley Beach facing a summer studying the penguins, he cannot have known anything about the sexual misdemeanors that are about to be unleashed by the miscreants at his very feet. At that point in time, the behavior of penguins has never been studied in any detail. However, Levick’s insistence on methodology, objectivity, and accuracy, marks him as a field biologist well ahead of his time.

  His scientific rigor might well be seen as a trait instilled in him by the navy. Cape Adare is one of the remotest places on Earth but, even in such a location, the rigid hand of naval discipline is apparent. There is the pretense, at Campbell’s insistence, of an invisible line down their small hut to separate the quarters of the enlisted men from those of the officers. Every Saturday, the members of the Northern Party toast wives and loved ones, and on Sundays, they hold a church service; the six of them, the only members of its small but loyal congregation. The orderliness of the men’s lives inside the hut mirrors Levick’s approach to recording the lives of the penguins outside the hut.

  The deliberateness of Levick’s approach to science would have come as no surprise to Wilfred Bruce, the former owner of the fountain pen. He describes Levick as “the slowest man I’ve ever met.” According to Bruce and others on the Terra Nova Expedition, Levick’s motto is Festina lente: Hasten slowly.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE RACE BEGINS

  As Levick amasses his data slowly on the sexual and social behavior of Adelie penguins at Cape Adare, his notes, written in blue-black ink, reveal that the penguins themselves hasten quickly as they go about the business of breeding. With only a narrow window when conditions in the Antarctic are favorable for breeding, the penguins are in a race to fledge their chicks before the weather turns and their food supplies disappear. When he first arrived at Cape Adare in February 1911, near the end of the previous breeding season, Levick had witnessed the fate of those chicks whose parents attempted to breed too late: they were abandoned and left to die before they could mature well enough to fend for themselves. His dissection of an emaciated fledgling had confirmed that it had starved to death, with the rocks in its stomach having made a poor substitute for food. In the Antarctic, survival and success rely on the same things: timing and food.

  It is October 20, 1911. Five men—Roald Amundsen, Oscar Wisting, Olav Bjaaland, Sverre Hassel, and Helmer Hanssen—depart from Framheim for the South Pole, taking four sledges and fifty-two dogs with them. The race for the pole has finally begun.

  They are dressed in the clothing of the Netsiliks and the dogs are harnessed in the way of the Netsiliks—things Amundsen had learned when completing his childhood dream of the Northwest Passage. Four underperforming dogs are set free and left to find their own way back to Framheim, if they can (a couple do). As the men make their way to their first depot at 80°S, they encounter a very thick fog, yet Amundsen is ecstatic. They are able to navigate and find the depot easily using the flags they had set out before the winter. It is “a brilliant test,” he notes, of their meticulous precautions and preparations.

  At their depot they have food aplenty, as it had originally been set up with an eight-man expedition in mind. They load the sledges with the gear and food that had been left there on their first, injudicious, attempt to get away over a month earlier. Now that the race has really begun and the conditions for the Norwegians seem good, they are, as Amundsen records on October 24, 1911, “enjoying life.”

  It is October 24, 1911. Just as Amundsen and his four companions are “enjoying life” at their 80°S depot, Scott’s complex plan for getting to the South Pole, which is nine hundred miles away from their base at Cape Evans, at last, gets underway.

  Two motor sledges and four men set off across the frozen sea ice, with each sledge pulling a commendable one and a half tons of supplies slowly, very slowly. For that reason, the main party, consisting of men and ponies, is to leave a week later.

  On the morning of November 1, 1911, a line of eight ponies, each pulling a loaded sledge and each accompanied by a man, sets out across the sea ice heading for the former Discovery Expedition’s hut at Hut Point. A line of dark gray figures, they disappear into the nothingness and grayness of an Antarctic day that threatens blizzards and snow. At Hut Point, they pick up another two ponies and their attendants, who had gone ahead on account of the two ponies being so slow.

  Five days after leaving Hut Point, the caravan of ten ponies and ten men comes across the two motor sledges, broken down and abandoned. Of the two, the one to get furthest had managed to cover a mere fifty miles from Cape Evans. The four men who had been with the motor sledges had depoted some of the food and fuel, then proceeded to carry on with the rest, pulling the sledges themselves with nearly four hundred miles to the base of the Beardmore Glacier still ahead of them.

  From the outset, Lawrence “Titus” Oates, the man in charge of the ponies, has complained that the ponies are not really up to the task:

  A more unpromising lot of ponies
to start a journey such as ours it would be almost impossible to conceive.

  Indeed, the ponies are proving not the most ideal means of transport in the blizzards and snow that now confront them on the barrier. Their feet sink into the snow, forcing Scott to switch to “night” marching when, even though it remains daylight, the temperatures are lower and the surface of the snow is firmer. Icicles form on the ponies’ eyelashes and occlude their vision. When they stop, the men must build snow walls to help protect the ponies from the wind because they do not suffer the cold well. Oates writes in his diary, with what seems like a measure of satisfaction:

  Scott realizes now what awful cripples our ponies are and carries a face like a tired old sea boat in consequence.

  A week after leaving, the main party becomes tent-bound, stalled by a blizzard too awful for the ponies to be harnessed to their sledges and expected to walk into the wind-driven snow with its wicked windchill. Yet a third element of Scott’s complex plan that involves a combination of different means of travel and supporting parties waltzes into the camp seemingly untroubled by the conditions. It is the two dog teams with their drivers Meares and Demitri Gerov. They had left Cape Evans last and were not expected to rendezvous with the main party and the motor sledges until 80°30´S, somewhat beyond the One Ton Depot. Yet, here they are now, a week ahead of schedule, within one hundred miles of Cape Evans and miles before One Ton Depot. The dogs have traveled quickly and, when at rest, lie under the snow drift untroubled by the blizzard conditions. The unvoiced truth, laid bare for all to see, is that Amundsen has chosen the best means of travel. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who is sharing a tent with Scott, notes in his diary that even Scott thinks “Amundsen with his dogs may be doing much better.”

  Apart from the undeniable differences in the way the dogs and ponies travel and withstand the Antarctic conditions, another lies in what they eat. Whereas the dogs can be fed on locally available seal meat, and even their own companions, the nearest food available for the ponies must come from New Zealand, 2,500 miles away, and it is bulky. In an effort to cut down on the bulk of forage needed to be carried with them on the sledges, Scott’s party have supplemented the ponies’ feed with oats and oilcake, but these are not adequate nutritionally. All the ponies are losing condition. Scott is forced to start sacrificing them and to feed their meat to the dogs. Originally, he had intended that the dogs would come only about halfway to the Beardmore Glacier, but now he has no choice but to take the dogs much further. At the same time, Scott has abandoned any pretense that they might be able to take the ponies onto the Beardmore Glacier itself.

  It is October 24, 1911. As Amundsen’s men and dogs sit feasting on the food at their first depot on their expedition to get to the South Pole, and the motor sledges of Scott set out from Cape Evans to begin the Englishman’s attempt to be first to the same geographic pole, Murray Levick is stuck at Cape Adare and going nowhere. Instead, he is left observing the Adelie penguins and their race to breed successfully in the short Antarctic summer.

  It is snowing and a cold wind is blowing hard from the southeast. Clouds cover the sun and the light levels are low. Levick notes that the birds lie flat on their nests, heads facing away from the wind, and that penguins throughout the colony have become “noticeably subdued,” with very little activity at all. By the afternoon, the wind drops, the cloud lifts, and the light levels improve dramatically, with the consequence that the penguins resume their frantic “love making, fighting, and building” of their nests.

  Levick focuses on the fighting he observes within the colony, which he ascribes pretty much exclusively to competition between the males.

  . . . the roar of battles & thuds of blows can be heard over the entire rookery, and of the hundreds of such fights I have witnessed, all have plainly had their cause in rivalry over the hens.

  Despite his admonition to the other men of the Northern Party that they must be certain of anything they record as fact, Levick assumes that if two birds are fighting, they must be males, or “cocks,” as he insists on calling them. Indeed, an entry in his Zoological Notes says as much:

  I conclude when I see two birds fight with flippers alone, that they are cocks.

  Even those birds fighting with beaks he believes to be males competing with each other for the “hens.” He cites an instance where he sees a penguin with its eye “put out” by another’s beak, leaving the right side of its face covered with blood.

  Murray Levick’s account of the penguins, as captured in his book Antarctic Penguins, with the exception of a little bit of argy-bargy among the males, describes a routine kind of domesticity:

  . . . it was not unusual to see a strange cock paying court to a mated hen in the absence of her husband until he returned to drive away the interloper, but I do not think that this ever occurred after the eggs had come and the regular family life begun . . .

  While male Adelie penguins tend to be slightly larger than females, there is much overlap in their sizes, and this is further complicated by the dramatic fluctuation in their weight that occurs depending upon the amount of time they have been onshore and fasting. Levick’s mistake, a prejudice born of his times, is to assume that whenever two animals are fighting, it is likely they are males and that it is the females that incubate the eggs first. As my intensive observations would later show, he is wrong on both counts.

  While Levick is not able accurately to determine the sex of the birds he is observing, he can readily distinguish new arrivals to the colony. Their breasts are sparkling white and clean, while the breasts of birds that have been in the colony for a few days or more are covered in reddish-brown guano stains from lying on the ground. This allows him to make one of his most startling observations, which he records in his Zoological Notes.

  Several times I have seen fresh cocks making love to mated hens who have shown no evasion to them until the mated cock has suddenly turned up and fought the interloper.

  It is the first intimations of the mate switching I will observe over seven decades later; it is the beginnings of his realization that the sexual behavior of Adelie penguins is nothing at all like what a Victorian gentleman might have supposed it to be.

  Two days later, Levick makes another observation in his blue notebook: three male penguins newly arrived at the colony, as evidenced by their “spotlessly clean” white breasts, are near a female. Her sex is unequivocally evident from the dirty tread marks down her back left by the “love making” from a previous partner, marking her, in Levick’s estimation, as “unquestionably an old arrival and a bride long past her virginity.” One of these males approaches the female and is initially rebuffed. After a bit of a brawl with the other two new arrivals, he tries again and, despite the protestations of the female as she pecks him, he persists in lying next to her until he is at last accepted by her.

  This too fits with my mate-switching observations and runs counter to the perceived wisdom that persisted in the penguin world for so long after Levick: that penguins are monogamous and mate for life.

  That same day, October 27, 1911, Cape Adare is hit by a frightful storm. This time the activity in the colony virtually stops, and the wind is so strong that the birds face into it, allowing the wind to pass over their streamlined and interlocking feathers, leaving an undisturbed layer of air trapped next to their skin to provide some insulation; a sort of biological equivalent of double glazing.

  It is at this time that Levick notices a penguin that has collected two pieces of sharply edged white quartz stone for its nest, rather than the rounded black basalt pebbles usually found on the beach. While Levick watches, a neighbor “put out its beak and stole one of the pieces!” Campbell is witness to the incident too. In a sign that the penguin study is assuming greater importance for Levick than the exploration that was their original goal, he laments, “Unfortunately I am going away sledging for four days . . .” Consequently, he asks Campbell to check on whether the quartz pieces continue to be transferred to other nests by this pen
guin pilfering.

  It is a brilliant piece of scientific insight, a look into the mind of a natural experimenter. It will take decades before anyone thinks to do likewise: to paint pebbles and record how they are stolen and passed from nest to nest in the colony. It turns out that the stones typically move from the nests on the outside of a subcolony to the central ones. The central nests are better protected from the skuas and benefit from the largesse that their neighboring nests provide, in terms of stones that can be pilfered given the right opportunity. As a result, central nests tend to be occupied by older, experienced breeders, and their nests are often the most elaborate in terms of the number of stones lining their floor and walls.

  These stones are not just for decoration. Elsewhere, Levick records how meltwater from the snow swamps nests and destroys the eggs. On one occasion, he and Browning find what he assumes is a female sitting on eggs in a nest with no stones. In fact, it is likely to be a male given that this is the first incubation spell—but no matter. The point is that the penguin is trying to sit on eggs “amidst a slush of melting snow, so that the eggs were nearly floating in water.” Browning and Levick add stones to the nest that they take from neighbors and then replace the eggs, lifting them out of the water, which the bird then resumes incubating. It says something again about Levick’s heart and also, in particular, the importance and value of stones to the penguins: they are their currency.

  When Levick leaves Cape Adare, he travels with Browning back to Duke of York Island, arriving on October 31, where he is surprised to find 1,500–2,000 penguins nesting in the valley inland from Crescent Bay; the one where he had found the carcass of a penguin tied to a rock by one of Borchgrevink’s party. No eggs can be found, though he looks carefully with Browning. To Levick, “the most striking fact about this rookery seemed to me to be the absence of open water for many miles, and the scant likelihood of there being any for at least another month or perhaps more.” It is evident to him that these birds must be prepared to face a long fast during the first part of their breeding season.