The Shark and the Albatross

by John Aitchison

  With a stumpy mast rigged from a spinnaker pole, it took them almost a week to tack to and fro along the south coast of the island and round to Grytviken on the north side, where they were towed to the old whaling station, by then occupied by the British Antarctic Survey.

  After a less eventful journey, we anchor by an island even smaller than Dream, and Dion takes us ashore in the inflatable. There are penguins here, but rather than Adélies they are a group of young chinstraps, and they’re in a bad way. Penguin colonies are never the cleanest places but these birds are filthy, with mud plastered all over their downy feathers. Like the Adélies, these are southern birds, suited to life around snow and ice, where the chicks’ down is good insulation against the cold. On this island all the snow has melted, leaving a dangerous, glutinous mixture of mud and penguin droppings, coloured red by digested krill. This part of the Antarctic peninsula has recently become warm enough for it to rain, compounding the penguins’ problems because waterlogged chicks can die of exposure. The warming is affecting the sea here as well, which makes the greatest difference to those extreme ice-birds, the Adélies.

  Alarmed by the quagmire in the chinstrap colony, we press on further south and drop anchor among the Fish Islands, a scattering of low bare rocks in a bay ringed with glaciers. The GPS says we are virtually on the Antarctic Circle, but still some way north of where Jérôme and his wife once spent the winter on their boat.

  At midnight I stand on deck as the sun dips briefly behind a mountain. Distant icebergs glow apricot, like the sky. The air is very cold and perfectly still but the floes move anyway, propelled by the tide, their dark shapes gliding across the sky’s reflection as if the sea is breathing. One grinds along the side of the Golden Fleece and white lights flicker on its rough surface. I watch them as it passes and turn, wondering, to find the newly risen moon lighting the floes and glaciers, blue and silver. The sea reflects unfamiliar southern stars. Among them I recognise only my old friend Orion, who stands upside down in the sky and is restored when he’s reflected in the sea. I could spend all night out here but in four hours we will start filming, so I go to my bunk and fall asleep to the sound of ice scraping along the hull. It’s something I never imagined I would be pleased to hear, but the ice means there should be Adélies.

  In the morning we go ashore and find hundreds of them, spread across several islands. Some of the adults are in pairs, displaying to each other. They point their beaks at the sky and slowly flap their flippers while they trumpet, their breasts pulsating with the effort. Others lie on the snow to cool down. To our great relief the largest island alone has more than 100 chicks, so we are not too late to film them going. In fact, most are still moulting their last tufts of down: it lingers on top of their heads and many still wear fluffy brown caps. Their backs are the smoky blue of exhaust fumes and their fronts are completely white. They lack the adults’ eye rings. When the chicks crouch and fluff up their feathers they become something like a pot, short and squat, to conserve heat, but when they slick them down again and stretch their necks, they are long and skinny. One group of youngsters seems almost ready to go to sea. They flap, but their flippers don’t work in the air and they buzz about like clockwork toys. Even so, it is safer to practise on the land: this is a dangerous place to learn to swim.

  An adult hops up the path from the sea and five chicks immediately pound towards it, demanding food. Only one of them might be its own, so the adult turns and runs as fast as it can. The chicks follow, tripping and falling over each other until just one is left in pursuit. The adult seems to know that this is the right one, or perhaps it has just had enough of running on a full stomach, and it regurgitates a mush of krill into the chick’s mouth. The tiny crustaceans are the Adélies’ staple food. Antarctic krill breed in the shelter of the ice and feed on the algae growing underneath, which is why having an ice-covered sea really matters to these penguins.

  While we have been counting the chicks, Jérôme has taken the Golden Fleece around the islands, looking for seals. He calls on the radio to say that according to his chart plotter he is now far inside the glacier. There are new islands there too, unsurveyed and unnamed, revealed by the retreating ice front. Leopard seals are no longer the Adélies’ most pressing problem – the Antarctic peninsula is feeling the heat more than almost anywhere else on Earth. Of course, there can be abnormally warm years anywhere, but this is a real change: just thirty years ago the sea here would have been frozen for almost three months longer than it is now, which is why the penguins are suffering. Even this southern colony was several times larger when Jérôme saw it last.

  In order to travel as fast as possible, penguins snatch breaths while leaping out of the water in smooth curves. Groups porpoising like this look spectacular. Just offshore from the busiest island there is a low rock, which seems perfect for filming them. It is just large enough for the tripod and me, so Dion drops me off. Landing small boats on icy shores comes to him as naturally as breathing. He was born aboard his parents’ yacht after the winter they had spent down here, delivered in South Georgia by Jérôme, who had looked up how to do it in a book.

  Soon a group of adult penguins hops down to the water opposite my rock, followed by a rabble of chicks. The adults are wary and they look all around before committing themselves. Nothing breaks the surface and there is no sound but the distant colony and the lap of waves. One wets its feet then takes a header into the sea. It goes off like a torpedo and the rest splash in after it. As they pass my rock they start to porpoise, making it as hard as they can for a seal to intercept them. The young birds crowd to the water’s edge but they stop on the brink and watch the adults go.

  There is a crash like thunder: the face of a glacier has collapsed into the sea. The sound rumbles on and on. The fallen section is enormous and through my lens I can see the white water at the glacier’s foot, the blue scar left in the ice and the spray still hanging in the air. The waves might be enormous too and they will be heading this way.

  ‘Dion! There’s a really big bit of ice fallen in, can you bring the boat?’

  Choosing such a low rock was not such a good idea after all.

  We are conscious of each passing day, so Kathryn splits the team in three: she and Doug Allan will stake out part of the penguin colony, while Doug Anderson and Liz prepare to film an iceberg underwater. Jérôme and I set out in his inflatable boat, looking for leopard seals. We scout the bays melted into a huge grounded iceberg and find a female, floating in one of its cold blue grottoes. Her body is sleek and lithe, her head rounded and reptilian. She brings her enormous mouth close to the inflated tube of our rubber boat and Jérôme watches her closely, holding an oar. He has had his boats punctured by leopard seals before. The idea of finding ourselves in the water with her alarms me and I can’t help imagining what she would do to a bird the size of my forearm, which has never swum before.

  Later I see exactly what she does, when I film her flaying a penguin; gripping its head and whipping it out of the water in a long fast arc. Without hands to hold it while she eats she has little choice, but in slow motion the effect is too horrible to watch and I am sure the shots will never be included in the programme. Predators must hunt but there are limits to how red in tooth and claw we want our nature films to be. Wilson’s storm petrels come pattering across the water like black butterflies, to pick up scraps of the penguin as she feeds.

  When Dion spots another seal, with a penguin it has just caught, Doug Anderson is ready to dive. Doug Allan and I film from above, as the seal rolls and turns around him. His bubbles and the waves make it hard to tell what is happening but the dead penguin seems to pass between the two of them while Doug dives deeper, then ascends.

  When he climbs out he describes something extraordinary. The seal swam around him with the dead penguin in her mouth, more curious than aggressive. She came close, then dropped the penguin. It sank and Doug swam down to retrieve it. When he held it out she took it gently from his hand and gave it back:
he was being courted by a leopard seal.

  Through moments like these we are coming to know the seals better, although most of their lives are still hidden. Clearly they hunt around the ice, using it to rest on and to hide. There are at least four seals working these islands. They often haul themselves out on the floes to sleep but they each seem to patrol their own area of shore. Knowing this has not helped us yet: we still have no film of a seal trying to catch a young penguin and the islands are emptier now. The youngsters slip away in small groups and so far we have missed them going.

  Fifteen chicks are teetering towards the shore. When they jump they hold their flippers back, to counterbalance their heads. Their soft feet land silently unless the stones tap against each other. They are fat, rather clumsy, and they seem unsure about where to go, but they will follow anybody, so when one bird starts the others fall in behind. Several take the sensible route on a penguin path, but three go the wrong way to the top of a small cliff and become stuck on a ledge with a two-metre drop to the shore. They look uneasy up there, with only their claws holding on. They want to be with the other penguins but they don’t know how to get down. One leans far out and then falls, feet first, landing on the rocks with a thump. It scrambles up unharmed. Falling must be inevitable if you are a penguin and they seem to expect it. They buzz their flippers as if they are trying to take off, straining upward on their toes. Several walk over and stand close enough to touch, staring at the sea. Occasionally one cocks its head sideways and looks up at me. They are gentle company. These birds have never swum before and now they are lined up, wondering what’s in the water. They seem impossibly unlikely to survive. I try to imagine how they will cope with the dwindling ice, how much longer Adélie penguins will nest on these islands.

  I sometimes wonder whether any of the animals I film will become extinct, leaving these images as part of the record of their time on Earth. I have filmed rarer birds than these Adélies, but when I look at the young penguins, preening and pottering about my feet, I can’t help thinking it would have been like this to sit beside a group of dodos. Adélies could move further south to find more ice but eventually the Antarctic continent will block their way and that will be the beginning of the end, because penguins must always have access to the sea. Their species may become one of the earliest casualties of climate change.

  More young birds are coming down to the shore and as they pass I speak to each of them: ‘Good luck. Good luck. Good luck.’

  The bay looks different every day, not just because the light changes but the ice moves as well, so the whole landscape rearranges itself. The weather is changing too. A storm is coming from the north, bringing snow. Our world shrinks to just the closest rocks and icebergs. The wind moans in the rigging. It gathers brash ice and presses it against the Golden Fleece, forcing her anchor to drag. Jérôme moves her into the shelter of an island. It’s a risky strategy when there is ice around, because the wind might change direction and leave us without a way out, but there is little choice.

  In two days we will start the long journey back to the Falklands. We have not filmed a leopard seal catching a penguin. It is disappointing, of course, to come so far and not to do what we had hoped, but this is the Antarctic: unpredictable and quick to change. In the distance a seal surfaces with a penguin carcass, thrashing it while petrels flutter downwind. With the weather like this it is beyond our reach.

  By the time the wind drops there are many young penguins waiting on the beaches. They have been held back by the storm and they are ready for their first swim, but their way into the sea is blocked. The wind has piled broken ice against the islands in a creaking mass, stretching far offshore.

  We each take a radio and spread out, to give ourselves the best chance of seeing the penguins leave and the seals trying to intercept them. Kathryn spots the first group to go but they are hidden from where I am, on the largest island. The ice here is becoming patchy as the tide changes. Behind me a single adult comes down the path, followed by a group of youngsters. They scramble closer to the water, peering in, and this time I really think they’ll go. The adult decides the coast is clear and dives into a small gap. The first three or four young birds tumble after it, trying to stay together. One falls in backwards and panics as it hits the water, splashing spray everywhere. Another goes offshore but it is uneasy on its own and it comes straight back. This seems to give the others confidence and they all go in at once, paddling through the ice with their heads up, more like nervous ducks than penguins, propelled by short strokes of their flippers. Reaching the open water, they put their heads under, feeling the urge to dive, and down they go. Their dives are short to start with and they snatch breaths in between. In their brief lives they have never been alone and they call loudly to each other to stay close, but now is not the time to attract attention.

  Liz comes on the radio: ‘John, there’s a seal swimming around the coast towards you. It’s going to come into your bay.’

  Looking into the sun, with the ice as shiny as a broken mirror, the seal’s head stands out black when it rises between the floes and slips back under. The young penguins have noticed nothing. The first one tries to porpoise, shooting out of the water and landing upside down. Another flies out and falls sideways but they are learning incredibly quickly, gaining in speed and confidence. It is only minutes since they left the shore. A big piece of ice falls from an iceberg and smacks into the sea. All the penguins leap: they must have heard the impact underwater.

  The group divides. Seven or eight choose to stay among the floating ice. The more confident swimmers head out to sea and, miraculously, the seal passes inshore of them. It’s a close shave but with every metre they put between themselves and the islands, the safer they become. They may have made the better choice.

  Voices come over the radio, adding to the picture and confusing it: ‘Doug, have you seen anything there?’

  ‘He’s spy-hopping by the triangular bay where they started off.’

  There seem to be several seals, aware that more penguins than usual are leaving. To make progress among the floes the young penguins either have to dive under them, or scramble across their surface. Either way they can’t tell where the leopard seals are.

  A seal appears, patrolling the shore closer to them. It has not yet seen or heard the penguins but it can’t be long now. It dives and I cannot predict where it will come up next. One of the youngsters has fallen behind and is stuck in a crack, calling for the others. I see the seal’s dark head rise again. It sees or hears the penguin and slips under to close the gap. Cats and mice have nothing on this. The worst thing the bird could do now is to go back into the water. Liz has seen it too: ‘John, you may be on it already but the single Adélie chick has just dived in. It’s heading your way through the brash.’

  The barest hint of a sleek head comes up, the seal breathes and disappears. The bird surfaces, yelling and flailing at the water, struggling to catch up with the others. Still it has not noticed the seal following, the long neck rising like a periscope. A small iceberg blocks their way. The other penguins have already climbed its sides and the lone youngster claws at the smooth ice, slapping its flippers to gain purchase, and then it’s up and high enough to be safe, for the moment.

  The berg is moving, drifting slowly away with its penguin passengers. There is no doubt that Adélies need ice. This piece has already saved several of them. I wish I could be sure that the young penguins will find enough of it to keep them safe and fed for the rest of their lives.

  – FOURTEEN –

  AN AUDIENCE WITH EMPERORS

  Only one bird depends on ice more than the Adélie: the emperor penguin is so wedded to frozen water that it needs never set foot on land. Visiting them was a highlight of the twenty years I have spent filming and part of the adventure was the journey to one of their colonies, on the other side of the world.

  Mount Erebus drifts by the window, snow-covered and steaming. At almost 4,000 metres (more than 12,000ft), the vol
cano’s summit is well above the aeroplane. It’s a week now since I arrived in the Antarctic from New Zealand. On the way we passed a lonely spot, somewhere in the Southern Ocean, which lies exactly opposite my home in Scotland. The week has passed in an intense burst of training and preparation for the time ahead and now I am squeezed into the back of a Twin Otter with a jumble of sledges, filming and diving equipment, and Didier, a French underwater cameraman who used to work for Jacques Cousteau. The other three people in our team have flown out ahead of us, with all the food and camping equipment. When the plane took off, in front of the US Antarctic Program’s Station at McMurdo, there was no sense that we were racing over the frozen sea. The ice runway there is several metres thick and at this time of year, in the southern spring, it barely flexes, even under the weight of the large transport jets from New Zealand. An icebreaker visits once a year to smash a channel to the pier, allowing a fuel tanker and cargo ship to resupply the base. Further out in the Ross Sea the ice is less stable and we have a vested interest in how long it will last. For much of the ninety-minute flight I stare down at angular pieces of ice, making patterns that never quite repeat, like shards of glass in a shattered window.