The Shark and the Albatross

by John Aitchison

  He is now so hot that he lies flat on the sand to recover, still holding on to the penguin, which is very much alive. It bends its neck and tries to peck him. The sea lion’s teeth are suited to gripping rather than slicing and on the beach he has no easy way to deal with his prey. He will need to thrash the bird to pieces in the water, using his flippers for leverage. When he gathers himself and starts back towards the sea I dread filming what is about to happen, but then he stops, sets the penguin down on the sand and lets it go. The bird picks itself up, races into the waves and swims fast offshore. Matt, Justin and I look at each other, perplexed. Why did he release it after all that effort? Perhaps catching penguins is easier than it looks and he doesn’t need to eat them all, but over the next hour the mystery deepens as we watch him chase and catch several more birds in the shallows, then destroy them offshore, under a cloud of seabirds scavenging for scraps. At dusk we are still discussing the puzzle as we walk back to the hut, passing the penguin colony where well-fed chicks are settling down for the night beside their parents, except for those few who wait in vain.

  Tony’s storm arrives as forecast, a real hooley from the north, hammering the beach with rollers much higher than our heads, filling the bay with spume and a deep roar. Scenes like this are meat and drink to slow-motion cameras, so we lug the heavy equipment and its large battery to the water’s edge. The battery rests on the sand, connected to the camera by a cable. Blowing sand blurs the boundary between land and water and I drape a bag over the camera to protect it as much as possible. We cover our heads and breathe through scarves, facing the oncoming waves, which the wind is steepening spectacularly; and out of those waves come the gentoos, masses of them, as if the flying water is condensing into penguins. The sea lion has no hope of finding them in the maelstrom but instead they are threatened by the sheer power of the sea. Some strike the waves awkwardly and are flung upwards, spinning out of control. One punches through the top of a wave and emerges four or five metres above the beach, still going up, before crashing back into the smothering foam. Others fly upright, as if they were leaping through a door, with the entire frame behind them filled by a wall of spray, but penguins are tough birds and no matter how hard they hit the beach they are up and running in seconds, escaping the danger zone in the surf.

  When it is too dark to film I look down and discover the battery has been completely buried. Its cable rises from the sand, as though the camera is taking power directly from the beach. In those few wild hours we have filmed the first of the many penguins that will appear on screen in the Frozen Planet series, materialising magically from the South Atlantic’s life-giving, life-threatening waves. Piecing together the rest of the sequence over the next few weeks reveals something new and fascinating about how the sea lion hunts penguins and why, after such strenuous chases, he sometimes lets them go.

  When I was Kirsty’s age maths homework was not my favourite thing, but then I never did it in a small cabin, with sand swishing against the floorboards under my bare feet and the smell of the sea coming through an open window. That’s the scene I find after waking at dawn and walking to the settlement to visit my family. Being certain that everything you need to film happens only in the afternoon is an undreamedof luxury. It means there’s time to share breakfast (pancakes) and hear what they have been up to. Yesterday, the children tell me, they watched rockhopper penguins coming ashore by hurling themselves from the highest waves, then gripping tightly with their claws to bounce away from the water. By waiting quietly beside their path, they spent the afternoon eye to eye with the climbing birds, still wet from the sea and heavy with food. On the way back they met a sea lion. Freya shows me her drawing of it growling at them and Rowan photographed it for me, before they fled through the tussock grass. They have been using the tussock to make dens with Tony’s children, half-buried ones in the sand, thatched with stems. Tony’s wife Kim bakes brownies with them when they come home, happy and with sand in their hair. They tell me they’ve started to build a more elaborate den from driftwood. They make me promise to visit it with them when it’s finished, in a few mornings’ time. This afternoon they are coming to the penguins’ beach to watch us filming.

  We walk back together along the path past Tony’s vegetable garden: a small walled-in patch, nowhere near his house. The wall keeps out the Magellanic penguins, which dig deep burrows and wreak havoc with his lettuces, and a scarecrow made from fishing buoys is supposed to deter the Johnny Rooks, but they use it as a perch instead. To our left, the island rises steeply towards cliffs, while on the right it dips gently into the sea. Falkland steamer ducks rest near the beach and drift a little offshore as we pass. Their wings are too small for flight and instead they use them to ‘paddle-steam’ across the surface.

  We find Matt and Justin checking yesterday’s shots and deciding how to divide up the beach. Justin takes one camera to cover the section below the cliffs while the rest of us tuck ourselves in with the slowmotion camera at the other end, hoping the sea lion will not notice us. The Johnny Rooks have sharp eyes and they turn up immediately. One of them jumps onto the camera while I am rooting in my pack for a battery. Its feet slide on the smooth metal and it moves towards the back to find a grip. I have not locked the tripod and it starts to tilt under the weight of the bird, slowly raising the long lens. The Johnny Rook realises what is happening and clambers to the other end, perching on the lens hood. The camera starts to tilt the other way, so it scrambles back to where it started. Matt and I have been splitting our sides and wishing we’d had the foresight to film this slow-motion seesaw. We should have been thinking about what might happen next: with a flurry the Johnny Rook grips the viewfinder and pushes down hard, to take off. The camera and lens fall sideways onto the rocks, with the heavy tripod on top. When I pick them up the viewfinder is dangling by a cable, its metal bracket snapped clean through. Luckily almost anything can be fixed, at least temporarily, with camera tape, cable ties and driftwood, so we are back in business before the sea lion starts chasing the gentoos.

  Groups of penguins gather as before and rush through the surf. The sea lion catches some and again he lets one or two go. Others he takes offshore and shakes to pieces. It happens too far out to see clearly with the naked eye, which I am glad about for the children’s sake, but by watching the recordings we can see that when he catches a penguin he eats almost none of it, then carefully picks up the spilled lobster krill, intended for its chicks. Catching and releasing some of the birds makes sense after all: if they don’t feel heavy enough to have a full stomach, the sea lion knows he will gain nothing by killing them and that he is better off starting again. When he picks them up, the penguins’ lives are literally in the balance.

  New Island is a valuable place for making discoveries about the natural world. Scientists come here from many countries and a friendly Dutch researcher takes the children with her on her rounds of the nocturnal seabirds called prions, which nest in burrows among the tussock grass. The kids are delighted that each burrow is marked with a stone bearing a painted number, like a front door. They take turns to hold the fluffy chicks before they are weighed and returned to their dark homes, each having made its small contributions to our understanding of how the world works.

  Afterwards the four of us crawl into their driftwood den on the shore, completed after hours of work and filled with imagination, laughter and the reflected light of the sea. On a makeshift table stands a cup holding a cluster of flowers.

  The helicopter rises, taking us away, and we look down at Tony, Kim and their children, holding their arms high in farewell despite the blowing sand. When you live as far from the mainstream as they do, new friendships are rare and partings feel absolute. The helicopter’s shadow passes across the driftwood den and is cast onto the turquoise sea.

  There are certain times and places I will look back on with happiness, down the tunnel of the years. Among them are these days spent with my family, good friends and the penguins on those southern beaches.


  AN UPDATE ON NEW ISLAND

  Our filming almost coincided with the end of Tony and Kim’s time on New Island. They sold their section of the island to the conservation trust that already owned the other half and moved away. Their lives seem to be no less wild as a result: Kim now posts pictures of their children on horseback, galloping across the back-country of Montana.

  The whole island is a national nature reserve and it has an impressive thirty-year history as a research site, which befits a place with such important seabird colonies – the thin-billed prions that my children met number two million pairs: it’s the world’s largest gathering of these birds. Imagine if every one of their nests had its own hand-painted front door stone.

  The Falkland Islands are also home to the world’s largest breeding population of gentoo penguins. Their fortunes vary and the number of penguins had fallen dramatically a few years before our filming, probably because of a bloom of toxic algae. Gentoos can have several chicks, as long as there’s plenty of food, so they recovered quickly from this disaster and by 2008 they had reached a record high of around 120,000 breeding pairs, spread across eighty-five sites.

  In 2010 oil was discovered during exploratory drilling around the Falklands, raising the spectre of what an oil spill would do to these world-class seabird colonies. Commercial quantities of oil are expected to start flowing in 2017. Meanwhile gentoo penguins are spreading southwards and colonising new areas in the Antarctic, sometimes replacing Adélies, as the sea ice coverage falls.

  – THIRTEEN –

  PENGUINS TAKING THE PLUNGE

  It is hard enough to evade a determined hunter if you are an adult penguin, but what if you are a chick? Young penguins have a rite of passage every bit as dangerous as taking to the air for the first time with the enormous wings of a wandering albatross: they have to learn to swim, despite the predators waiting for them in the sea.

  Dream Island is remote, uninhabited and due south of Argentina: it sounds so romantic but in fact the island is cold and as hard as stone. It lies near the Antarctic peninsula and apart from a few tough lichens, little else lives here. Frost has shattered the rocks, leaving them stacked like tiles grouted with moss. I can pull them apart with my hands. The stones are angular and sharp except where a narrow path climbs away from the sea. It is made of pebbles polished by feet walking over them, perhaps for thousands of years, to judge by their near-perfect smoothness. They could have been tumbled in a stream.

  On the beach flatulent elephant seals lie side by side. They are shorthaired, sandy or ginger, and all of them are female. They are half as long again as me and very fat, although still much smaller than the three-ton males, which are the world’s largest seals. These are among the deepest diving of all mammals. Their large eyes have seen bioluminescent glimmers in the darkness, 2km (1¼ miles) down, where giant squid and others pass their unknown lives. The seals have come ashore to sleep and they wake reluctantly, bleary-eyed, craning their necks to watch me pass, as the stones of the beach clink under my boots. They respond with snorts, sneezes and gargling grunts like outboard motors, as well as the world’s loudest raspberries, which would have a five-year-old in stitches. On an Antarctic beach, when not much else is going on, elephant seals are good company – they never fail to make you laugh – but we have come here to film a different type of seal. One of the world’s most efficient predators also visits Dream Island: the leopard seal, but they seem to be in short supply.

  A dumpy bird is coming down the path towards the sea, sometimes walking, sometimes jumping. It passes close by without a glance. It’s a dapper Adélie penguin, no taller than my wellington boots. It is gleaming white on the front and black behind, simple in the extreme, with just its pink feet and another dash of pink on its beak adding some colour. Its eyes seem unusually expressive because each is ringed in white. As it blinks the rings become curves like crescent moons. The penguin holds its streamlined flippers at its sides. They serve in place of wings because, of course, these birds swim rather than fly. To film Adélie penguins swimming is the other reason we are here.

  ‘Penguin’ may have come originally from the Welsh, Breton or Cornish name for another black and white flightless bird, the now extinct great auk, which lived in the North Atlantic. Sailors carried the name south and applied it to the similar-looking birds they found there. The logbook of Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind refers to ‘a foule which the Welsh men name pengwin’, seen as they passed through the Straits of Magellan in the 1570s. The French still reserve pinguin for the great auk and call penguins manchot instead.

  In 1840 a French naval officer, Jules Sébastien César Dumont d’Urville, discovered these most southerly of all penguins and named them after his wife Adele. His voyages to explore the Pacific, the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic took him away from his family for even longer than a wildlife filmmaker. Instead of immortalising her as a penguin, Adele d’Urville would perhaps have preferred her husband to have spent more time at home. He named part of the Antarctic continent after her as well. His third expedition was the last to travel anywhere on behalf of France entirely by sail. It seems appropriate that we should have come here with another celebrated French sailor.

  Climbing the smooth path gives me a view across the island. Anchored in the inlet is the Golden Fleece, a 19.5-metre (65ft) motor-sailing ketch, which belongs to Jérôme Poncet. Jérôme has spent most of his adult life exploring the Antarctic and his knowledge is second to none. His son Dion helps him run the Golden Fleece, with Cathy and Céline making up the rest of the crew. I joined them yesterday from a passenger ship, with Liz, a series researcher. We have switched places with two whale scientists who have spent the last month helping to film an incredible sequence of hunting orcas. The collaboration has been a great success and the director, Kathryn, and cameramen Doug Allan and Doug Anderson, are still buzzing with excitement at how the whales made waves with their bodies and used them to wash seals from ice floes. This behaviour has never been filmed in detail before and it’s a real coup for the series, as well as yielding new scientific observations.

  The two Dougs are both outstanding cameramen who do much of their filming underwater. My role, in this second half of the shoot, is to bring a long lens and a slow-motion camera to bear when the leopard seals and penguins meet. Doug Allan has been here before, about fifteen years ago, for the BBC series Life in the Freezer. He says they found thousands of penguin chicks in the colony and when the young birds reached the water’s edge several leopard seals were waiting for them. He filmed the youngsters struggling through broken ice while the seals hunted them down. The sequence was memorable and traumatic to watch. The largest seals are more than 3 metres (10ft) long and they can open their mouths astonishingly wide. It took some nerve to dive with them. Doug filmed one as it grazed its large teeth across the lens port of his underwater camera housing. There were so many penguins going into the water, and so many opportunities for the seals to hunt them, that he saw a dozen or more being caught every day. Doug had imagined we would have no trouble filming this again, but we can see that something is wrong. The Adélies’ noisy colony should cover much of the island, yet from the hill we can see large areas of smoothed pebbles where there used to be nests. Their remaining colony is only a fifth of the size it was when Doug was last here. The penguins have almost literally melted away. It seems the leopard seals have gone as well: perhaps this year’s small group of chicks are just not worth waiting for.

  Kathryn and Jérôme make a difficult decision: rather than staying, in the hope that a seal will show up, we are going further south. Jérôme knows some other islands we might try but no boats have visited them this year, so we may find they have fewer penguins too. The journey will take a couple of days and time is precious: we are gambling that by doing this we will find a healthy colony before its young birds leave. At least further south it should be colder, so their breeding season will be less advanced. More than any other bird, besides emperor penguins, col
d is one thing Adélies do not mind. They are true ice-birds.

  Jérôme and Doug Allan are old friends who have shared many Antarctic journeys. In the wheelhouse of the Golden Fleece, where potted plants are scattered among the navigational instruments, they reminisce about some of their hairier moments, or at least Doug does – Jérôme tends to dismiss near-death experiences with a Gallic shrug. Doug describes one occasion when a massive gust laid the boat on her beam-ends. Amidst the chaos of flying books, equipment and people, he says Jérôme kept hold of the wheel and calmly walked up the wall, still steering the boat and allowing her to right herself.

  Even this pales in comparison with Jérôme’s pioneering Antarctic sailing in a much smaller boat, the 10-metre (33ft) sloop Damien, with his friend Gérard Janichon. In 1971 they visited the island of South Georgia, uninhabited except for some small settlements in a few bays on its north coast, marked as whaling stations on Jérôme’s chart. In a storm, south of the island, they were overtaken by monstrous seas. Jérôme describes the Damien tipping forward on the face of a wave taller than she was long, until for a moment the boat was vertical, then somersaulting – pitchpoling rather than capsizing – and landing upside down. She stayed there because the mast had become an effective keel. The two men were trapped inside the hull. Green underwater light came in through the portholes. The stove had strewn hot coal and ash everywhere. The hatches were battened down but water was pouring in anyway, siphoned through pipes never designed to operate the wrong way up. No one knew where they were and they were too far from the nearest inhabited land to be found, let alone rescued. Standing on the ceiling of the boat that had been their home for the last four years, Jérôme and Gérard shook hands and said goodbye. Then another enormous wave rolled them upright. They spent the next six hours bailing, chilled to the bone. They had just finished when the Damien capsized. This time they spent less time upside down because the mast snapped off. Again they bailed until they could do no more, collapsing like dead people onto soaking bunks where they slept, beyond caring. He says they hardly noticed when the boat turned turtle again and rolled right back over.