Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  DDU itself was on an island, part of a small archipelago about a kilometre from the coast. It had jaunty bright buildings painted orange, red and blue, built apparently on stilts on the uneven rock, and connected with steel walkways. Perhaps it was because the island was half-covered with snow, or perhaps it was the rocks, which were paler than McMurdo’s grimy volcanic base, but the base looked lovely—less of a mining town and more of a holiday camp.

  After the formality of the American system, I was struck by how little orientation I was given here and how few forms (none) I needed to fill in. I was just welcomed, shown to my room, which was bright and pleasant, though small, with two bunk beds, a desk and little else, and then led off for dinner in the main set of buildings.

  They say that Antarctica magnifies people’s personalities and perhaps it does the same for cultures. The immediate impression that I had on meeting French Antarcticans for the first time was their attitude to food. This was a small base, with perhaps sixty people in the summer and maybe twenty or thirty in the winter, but they had two chefs—one for the main meals and one to make fresh bread, pastries and delicate little cakes. At Mactown, alcohol was forbidden in the galley except on the most special of occasions. At DDU there were carafes of wine at the table every dinnertime.18 What’s more, we sat down, eight to a table, and had waiters serve us four courses—starter, main, cheese, dessert. Everyone on the base took turns at being waiter for the day. Why did they do this? Why not just have self-service? My hosts were bemused at the question. ‘Because it’s civilised’ was the best that someone could manage.

  While McMurdo was also like a large staging post, this base was much more of a destination. People didn’t just come in order to bounce on out to field camps; they stayed here to do their science. And the reason was the overwhelming abundance of Antarctic life that crammed every corner of this small island. As well as the emperors, Weddell seals dotted the remaining sea ice, skuas and snow petrels flew overhead and Adélie penguins were everywhere underfoot.

  DDU was built back in the days when there were no rules about staying away from penguins, and approaching them only sensitively, armed with stacks of permits. In the 1950s, before the Antarctic Treaty even existed, you could build a station wherever you liked, even smack in the middle of a huge Adélie colony. They were everywhere, hooting, hollering and honking. Unlike at Cape Royds, there was also an unmistakable and pervasive smell. Throughout the base, the air was thick with the heady, ripe, fishy reek of guano, produced by the overactive metabolism of birds that were in a hurry.

  It was appropriate in a way that the Adélies should be here. DDU was named after nineteenth-century French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville, who discovered this part of the Antarctic coast in 1840. There was a bust of him outside the main building, square of jaw and of shoulder, with his captain’s epaulettes, looking nobly out to sea. (Another French explorer’s ship was called Pourquoi Pas?—Why Not? - which is as good a way as any to explain the motivation of many of the early heroic adventurers.) Jules’s wife was called Adèle, which is why this part of Antarctica is called Adélie Land, and also where the Adélie penguins got their name.

  Still it seemed odd to find the Adélies so tangled up with human habitations. Their nests peppered the rocks surrounding each of the buildings, they hopped over and under the steel walkways and used the human-made snow paths to trot down to the sea.

  The next morning, on my way to visit the emperor colony, I was treated to an extreme version of this. In front of me, two French workers were sauntering down one of the snow paths, not moving quite quickly enough for an Adélie coming up behind. In a flash, this little creature, which barely reached their knees, marched up, extended its flipper, and gave a mighty whack! on one person’s calf. He jumped to one side and yelped and the penguin trotted on past. Out of my way. Job done.

  I was impressed. David Ainley had told me they did this, but I hadn’t quite believed him. I would come back to the Adélies later—I had already made an appointment to talk to the researchers about them when I’d finished with the emperors. But for now, I registered that one little whack had won over a corner of my heart. It wasn’t the cuteness that was beginning to captivate me, but the bravado, their sheer pint-sized chutzpah.

  The emperors were at the back of the island, the south side facing the mainland, where a drape of sea ice remained from the winter. My guide was Caroline Gilbert, a penguin researcher in her early thirties from the Hubert Curien Institute at the University of Strasbourg. She warned me to be careful as we left the rocky island and stepped out on to the sea ice. It was mainly thick enough to bear us, but where it abutted the rocks there could be dangerous cracks.

  I already knew about this. Over breakfast that morning the station doctor, Didier Belleoud, had told me cheerfully that somebody fell in there every year. He had come down to spend his second winter here, and—as is traditional at the base—he would also be base commander on the principle that unless someone fell sick he would otherwise have the least to do. But already this year he had been called into dramatic action. Within two hours of arriving he had to perform an appendectomy on a mechanic. The summer doctor on station was the anaesthetist, and the two vets helped. (I tried to imagine how I would feel coming round from an operation to find two vets looking down at me, and decided that I didn’t want to know.) The mechanic was apparently fine.

  We had safely navigated this danger zone and were now on the sea ice proper, which felt just as solid as the land. Though we were not yet at the colony, we were already starting to see lone emperors sliding past. They were zipping along on their bellies, but still they did it with dignity. If an Adélie penguin were tobogganing like this it would be exuberant, but the emperors were businesslike in their approach. They paddled efficiently with their feet, right, left, right, left, picking up impressive speed, while their heads remained motionless and their flippers stayed neatly at their sides.

  Now we had reached the colony, where several thousand birds, loosely gathered, were standing around near their chicks. Their cackling was loud but oddly muffled. The adults looked like slightly officious aldermen. They moved ponderously, their ample bellies spilling slightly over what would be their trousers, the gold at their throats like a mayoral chain. Their infants, a soft dove-grey colour with big owlish eyes, had the impertinence that comes from privilege. As Caroline disappeared off to survey her subjects, I sat on the snow a little way off the colony, and a bevy of chicks immediately came and crowded around me, staring with open, confident curiosity.

  Caroline returned from her sweep of the birds and crouched down next to me. ‘Lots of people prefer the Adélies,’ she said. ‘They’re easier because they have their own nesting sites. Emperors are more anonymous. It’s very difficult to recognise individuals and get involved in their behaviour. But I prefer emperors, because they’re more peaceful.’

  The chicks were in late adolescence. They were almost as tall as their parents and, already, most of them had started losing some of their downy coats and showing patches of their adult feathers. They would soon need to go off and forage for themselves, building up fat reserves to see them through the winter. But it would be in a few years’ time, when they were old enough to breed, that the fat would really hit the fire. Emperor penguins, particularly the males, have one of the toughest winter experiences on Earth. Unlike real aldermen, their dangling bellies come from cold hard necessity.

  The whole thing begins in April, just after the sea has hardened for the winter, when males and females reconvene at the colony—a patch of sea ice usually in the lee of some cliffs or other nearby landmark. They quickly meet, woo and mate. Emperors are deeply loyal for the season, but like the Adélies they are serial monogamists. If last year’s mate doesn’t show up on time, they will quickly find someone else. They have to. Time is too short to tarry. Those that have paired will stand slightly out of the crowd, billing and cooing a little to make sure they are fully imprinted on each other.

&nb
sp; A few weeks later, the female will lay a single egg, which drains much of her body’s remaining reserves. In a delicate operation, she carefully shifts it on to her mate’s feet. Even here, which is one of the most northerly colonies in Antarctica, temperatures can by now be as low as -4°F, and if an egg touches the ice for more than a few minutes, the chick inside will perish.

  The female will now disappear; she will walk until she finds open water, and then feed herself furiously to make up for the weight she has lost. The male will be left holding the egg, for two months, sometimes more. He can’t eat. He can only wait, and hope. The nights will grow darker and longer, the temperature colder, storms and winds will whip up into a frenzy. But he must shut down and carry on. He has a special silhouette, hunched and quiet. Only if he stands up and stretches can you see the flash of white that is the egg, before he settles down again, draping his stomach, keeping his infant warm.

  Caroline’s research was about what happens during that long dark winter after the females have left and before the eggs have hatched. She became fascinated by how the males can survive the cold, the hunger and the wind. So four years ago she chose five males that had successfully mated and would therefore be incubating eggs, caught and instrumented them before the females left, and then watched them throughout the winter.

  The instruments were complicated. Working with the doctor in a specially adapted operating theatre, wearing blue hospital gowns, hair nets, sterile rubber gloves and using sterile green sheets, she surgically implanted a data logger to record the temperature just under the skin and the bird’s core temperature.19 On its back, she glued another logger measuring temperature and light levels. She painted a number on its white breast using a homemade preparation of a black waterproof liquid, and stuck a piece of coloured tape under the feathers on its back. That way she could use binoculars to see either the colour or the number, depending on whether the bird was facing inwards or out.20

  Didn’t the operation and the instruments bother the penguins? ‘No. We followed them closely and they behaved completely naturally. They still had eggs, chicks, went out to sea. We really do care about not disturbing them. They need to live their life. If not we don’t get good data.’

  And then her professional detachment left her for a moment. ‘I went almost mad with them,’ she says. ‘I had to know everything. They’re so human-like you really get attached. If they’re not marked you can’t follow them, you don’t recognise them. But for the marked males I watched everything. If you spend three hours every day watching, taking notes, by the end you need it. When the weather was too bad with snow and wind and I had to stay here it was frustrating. It’s like a drug. I needed to see them. You get addicted, you want to know what they’re doing, is the female back? Does he still have the egg? Is everything OK? In some ways they were my experiment. In some ways they were my friends.’

  Unlike virtually all other seabirds, emperors are not at all territorial. They don’t even have their own nest sites, unless you count their feet. Instead, charmingly, they actually huddle together to stay warm.21

  And it works. Caroline’s experiments show that temperatures within the huddle can be searing. In a lab, the magic numbers for an emperor penguin are between 14°F and 68°F. Above that range the penguins start to sweat. Below, they have to expend extra energy to lift their temperatures upwards. In between, they’re happy.

  But the sensors Caroline implanted showed that inside the huddle, the temperature of the penguins’ skin often shot up above the magic 68°F mark and sometimes got as high as 98.6°F. They ought to have overheated, but they didn’t. The core temperature stayed absolutely set at 96.8°F, the optimum value to incubate the eggs.

  Caroline thinks that the birds selectively shut down their metabolism depending on how warm they get. From the outside the temperature is bitter, the winds biting. But inside the huddle, the birds are drowsy and warm. It’s as if they’re in a deep sleep, hibernating vertically, with an occasional shuffle to shift whose turn it is to take the outside slot, and turn their broad black backs against the wind and snow.22

  Now the emperors’ achievement sounded less like a heroic struggle against the odds, and more like a warm bath or a long lie-in. When I said this to Caroline, she shrugged. ‘Emperors are Zen. They know how to be here in the winter. We can learn a lot from them.

  ‘A plumber who wintered with me said that Adélies are like the summer people, frantic, all over the place, so much to do! Emperors are like winterers. They’re quiet, calm and focused. The winterers here leave car, home, France, everything behind. To survive here in the winter you have to cooperate, just like the penguins.’

  That afternoon I went back out on to the sea ice, this time on my own. Already the mood had changed; the sky was darkening and the wind was rising. Though the chicks came back up to me, they now had chunks of hard wet snow lodged in their downy fur. I tried to imagine how it would feel to spend a winter out here on the ice. That morning, lying in the pleasant sunshine, I had been halfjoking when I talked to Caroline about long lie-ins and warm baths. But now that every bit of my exposed skin was being whipped by the growing wind, I felt a proper respect for the emperors.

  Their story was certainly a romantic one. Caroline had described the scene when the long-awaited females return from their foraging. Each will pause on the edge of the vast huddles of males, sing, stop, listen for an answer, and walk on. Three or four times she will sing, then—among the calls of thousands—she hears the answer she has been waiting for. She brightens, lifts her head. The male shuffles eagerly towards her, balancing the egg or perhaps even the chick. And the two birds hug. They really do. They press their chests up against each other and stroke each other’s heads.

  I saw now that this wasn’t anthropomorphising the birds so much as putting affection in its proper place in nature. The emperors hug for more or less the same reason that we humans do. Evolution insists on that level of connection and commitment for all of us, as a necessary counter to the harshness of the world outside.

  I also thought of what Caroline said at the end. ‘To survive here in the winter you have to cooperate, just like the penguins.’ That’s how Apsley Cherry-Garrard and his two companions made it out of their appalling winter journey. They huddled together in their makeshift igloo. They said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and kept each other’s hopes alive.

  That evening the wind picked up even more. As we ate in the dining room we heard it tuning up outside and then launching into a full-blooded symphony. It started with a rumbling bass, then a throaty roar, with a high-pitched whistling and whining around the windows. As the intensity increased, the middle register came in and I could feel the building swaying slightly. Someone said that it had reached 100 knots.

  After the dessert plates were cleared by today’s band of waiters, everyone else gathered around the large TV screen for a showing of Braveheart, but I pulled on my parka and slipped outside. The blast of the wind in my face took my breath away. Imagine riding full tilt on a motorbike without a helmet. Imagine sticking your head out of the window of a speeding intercity train. I hung on to the railing helplessly for a moment until I could steady my feet against the onslaught. I pulled on my goggles and, bowing my head and shoulders, I dragged my way up the steel walkway and on to one of the paths that has a rope strung alongside—I now knew why.

  The Adélies lay impassively on their nests. They were hunkered down, drawn into themselves so that they had become the shape and size of rugby balls; they were facing into the wind, their eyes closed, their feathers caked in snow. Unobserved by them, or indeed by anyone else, I dragged my way round to the lee of the hill that tops the island. This felt crazy. Already my shoulders were starting to ache.

  Once in the wind shadow of the hill, I could stand more or less upright; there were still strong gusts but I was free of that relentless onslaught. I made my way carefully down to the water. The wind was coming from behind, from the continent. It was born up on the domes th
at marked the high points of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The still, cold air spilled down the sides of these domes, gathering momentum as it fell, Niagara-like, until it reached the coast with the force of a hurricane. From where I sat, wedged up against a rock at the water’s edge, I could actually see the wind arriving around the sides of the hill. It sent the snow on the ground curling upwards like smoke, and skimmed across the surface of the water leaving stippled waves and spray in its wake.

  I decided to try to climb up the hill, but soon I was on hands and knees, and then lying almost flat and inching upwards, while the gusts threatened to pull me away from the rocks I was clinging to. I hadn’t even reached the top when, raising my head slightly, I felt the full force of the wind like a water cannon and I was shaken. This wasn’t fun any more. Spooked now, I stumbled and tripped back down to the nearest walkway where I dragged myself back to the dorm building. I was out for only two hours. Habitations and help were always at hand. I couldn’t begin to imagine how the early explorers coped with those conditions out on the ice, on their own.

  The next morning the wind had abated just enough for me to fight my way out to inspect the damage. I rounded the hill and stared south in astonishment. Between us and the mainland there was now nothing but clear blue water. The solid sea ice that I had walked on the previous day had blown clean away, taking the emperors and chicks with it.