within padded gloves, I broke through the snow and hit melt-
water running down the rock face. It appeared that I was falling
down a waterfall, and the water, I took time to notice, was
yellow—liberally infused with a year’s worth of penguin guano
from colonies higher on the mountain.
It was the penguins that had brought me to this remote place,
far from an astronomer’s comfort zone. As, somehow, I managed to
stop my sliding, I looked up to see my friend Tom Hart inexplicably
able to stand on the same slopes that had seen me repeatedly slide
towards the ocean. Tom describes himself as a ‘penguinologist’,
and I was supposedly on this trip to assist him in his research.
It’s certainly true that Tom looked at home in Antarctica, his
uniform of tattered fleece, boots, and rucksack looking much
more fit for an expedition to the end of the Earth than to the
Victoria pub in Oxford. He is the architect, as well as the caretaker, of an extended network of seventy-five cameras that monitor
136 Too Many Penguins
Figure 20 Late summer on the Antarctic Peninsular, with the penguin nesting site now a muddy mess.
behaviour in penguin colonies across the Antarctic Peninsula
(the bit of the continent that sticks ‘up’ towards South America),
plus a few scattered across the islands of the vast Southern
Ocean. While researchers such as Tom used to visit each colony
at best once a year, recording an annual census of the birds, the
cameras now take an image every hour (Figure 20).
Thanks to this network, nesting gentoo, Adélie, and chinstrap
penguins are under scrutiny they’ve never faced before. As a
result, the complex behaviour of the penguins as they fight for
spots to nest, breed, and raise their chicks can be observed and
examined. Rather than just having an annual count of each col-
ony, changes in behaviour which might be due to climate change,
tourism, or fishing can be recorded, and down here that’s import-
ant. The Antarctic appeals to Tom, a committed conservationist,
Too Many Penguins 137
because it is protected by the Antarctic Treaty. Though politics
interferes, this is the one place on Earth where clear evidence of
harm to an ecosystem caused by humans should immediately
provoke a response designed to fix the problem. Here, at least, we
can make sure we’re not ruining the planet.
There are two problems. The first is that while the penguin-
ologists now have access to more data than ever before, they are no
more numerous themselves. They face, as we astronomers do, a
vast expanse of information encoded in images and have turned
to citizen scientists for help. The second problem was the reason
we were in Antarctica. There is no readily available Wi-Fi signal
that far south, and the cost of transmitting data back to base in
Oxford prohibitive. The images are therefore stored locally, and
the cameras must be visited to give up their colony’s secrets.
Each annual visit also serves as a chance to perform mainten-
ance, to prop up tripods and supports, and to replace the batter-
ies. Tom’s life, therefore, is a cross between that of a conventional academic and a travel agent with a penchant for the cold, though
I have to admit there’s at least a flavour of nineteenth-century-
style adventuring somewhere in the mix. The logistical challenge
of getting to the cameras is made worse by their placement in
obscure and little-visited spots. There is an existing research net-
work in Antarctica and during my visit, members of the team
popped in to deliver chocolate to the Argentineans, accidentally
stumbled upon the Ecuadorian base, and visited a British Post
Office. The scientists attached to these places and the various
national programmes have done much to help understand
Antarctica, but limiting the survey to penguin colonies easily
accessed from these bases would give only a very fragmented
picture of what’s going on.
Instead, Tom and his team often use what they call ‘ships of
opportunity’ to explore. They are essentially hitchhikers with a
138 Too Many Penguins
purpose, occasionally when needs must and funds allow resort-
ing to hiring a yacht, but mostly travelling on board the cruise
ships which take 20,000 or so tourists to the Antarctic Peninsula
each year. My trip was on board the Quark Expeditions ship,
Ocean Endeavour, a voyage on a converted Polish car ferry alongside 180 tourists from around the world who wanted to see pen-
guins and ice. We’d left the southern Argentine port of Ushuaia,
one of several places in Tierra del Fuego that claims to be the
southernmost city in the world, and survived crossing the Drake
Passage, the stormy sea that divides the continents. As I lay as
still as possible in a rocking bunk, queasy to the core, I assumed
we were being treated to a ship-threatening tempest, but it was
nothing so extraordinary; the Drake Passage just is rough.
By the morning of my icy slide, we’d already made it to ten of the
network’s cameras. Every visit is crucial, because each year brings
only a handful of opportunities to get to each site. Miss a camera,
and it will fall dark for a year, its batteries drained, leaving a large gap in our knowledge of that site. So the work was important, but
it had equally been straightforward. In each place, I’d been able to
enjoy spectacular surroundings, in a landscape of towering moun-
tains and looming icebergs under a beautiful late summer Sun.
The sheer diversity of the ice is remarkable, and to me com-
pletely unexpected. Most of it glows a deep blue colour in the
sunshine, a colour which indicates ice under pressure. Squeezed
hard, the air bubbles that normally scatter light and make snow
appear white are absent. As we walked, crunching through more
recent snow, we left a trail of blue footprints behind us. The white
and blue of the ice is broken by dark, almost black volcanic rock
formations, and we sailed through passages which divided sheer
cliffs. This isn’t exactly unexplored territory, but it was surpris-
ingly moving to look from horizon to horizon and see precisely
no evidence of human interference.
Too Many Penguins 139
The aim that morning was to get to the last camera of the sea-
son. After this, the oncoming winter would mean that Tom’s net-
work would have to survive without him for another year. This
one was last for good reason—it is far from the landing spots
suitable for a cruise ship full of tourists. I’d reached my precar-
ious position halfway up a cliff via a bouncy ride in a little inflatable boat, a Zodiac, with Tom and one of the ship’s expedition
staff, Raefe.
Raefe had recently retired from a career with the Australian
military, a background which showed up in his meticulous kit,
his complete unflappability, and his willingness to be diverted
from his day’s routine by helping out us scientific hitchhikers. As
I clung to the ice, I glanced down to see him sitting with a hand
on the tiller of t
he boat, idling to keep the flakes of ice we’d
pushed through from snarling the boat. I was very aware I was
making a fool of myself, failing to live up to even the pretence
that I belonged in this wilderness, as I awkwardly scrambled up
to where Tom was.
He eyed me sceptically, spotting the streaks of guano that now
decorated my waterproofs, and announced we were going back
to the boat. I’ll spare you the details, but getting back was no
more fun than making the little progress I’d managed, but all
ended well. We found a different landing spot, and Tom set off
alone, happy to cope without the presence of an astronomer. I sat
and watched him scramble up, and thought about what was
going to happen to the data he was bringing back.
The camera on top of the hill hadn’t been visited for over a
year. For most of that time, images would have been taken every
hour, adding up to thousands over the course of the year. During
that time, nest sites would have emptied and then disappeared
under snow, awaiting the return of the penguins in the spring.
Once they returned, then they would have mated, prepared nests,
140 Too Many Penguins
guarded eggs, and raised chicks, all under the snapping gaze of
Tom’s cameras.
The outlines of this story are familiar to anyone who has ever
watched a nature documentary, but it’s the details that matter. By
flicking through the images from their cameras the penguinolo-
gists had noticed something that would have been hard to see
otherwise; penguins would occasionally return to their nests
even when the colony wasn’t occupied. They seem to be keeping
an eye on their summer homes, perhaps doing a little light main-
tenance, but mostly ensuring the spot is still theirs. Nests are
defended vigorously when the tightly packed colony is fully
occupied, and it seems that at least some of the birds want to get
a head start in securing territory.
Those images are strangely moving, a single penguin appear-
ing in a frame or two in the Antarctic twilight. Other newly
revealed aspects of penguin behaviour are less romantic. There
is a part of visiting the Antarctic that doesn’t come across in
documentaries, and which won’t show up in the holiday snaps
of the camera-toting tourists who sailed with us. There isn’t a
nice way to say this, but penguins absolutely stink. The smell is
difficult to describe, being acrid, pungently fishy, and rich and
complex like an old brie. Try imagining a heap of manure
sprinkled with herring left out in the summer sun and you’ll be
close.
One of the reasons that the birds smell so bad is their charm-
ing habit of carelessly defecating wherever they are. It’s common
to watch one charmingly tottering along, as photogenic as you
like, before stopping to lift its tail and expel a bright white stream of guano with surprising speed and range. A study by researchers
Victor Meyer-Rochow and Jozef Gal published in 2003 found the
pressures exerted by defecating penguins are up to four times
higher than in humans, a fact I mention mostly because they also
Too Many Penguins 141
note that it’s not yet known whether the birds are actively choos-
ing which direction to direct the flow.
In other words, it’s not clear whether they’re aiming, but results
from the camera traps suggest there might be a reason for their
apparently unhygienic behaviour. When the main colony returns
in the spring, some of the nesting sites lie under snow. Until the
snow melts, nesting cannot occur, and the main business of the
summer can’t start. Once it does, the images from the cameras
show a hive of activity, but they also show something else.
The areas where the penguins are nesting are often clear of snow
long before their surroundings. This is, Tom reckons, not the effect
of penguins settling in suntraps, but a consequence of their liberal
additions to the local environment. As I’d had the chance to note
first hand, snow with penguin guano in it is darker than its sur-
roundings, so it’s possible that it absorbs more heat from the
Sun—like wearing dark clothes on a hot day. There are other pos-
sibilities; it may be that the effect is more direct, and it’s the heat of the penguin poop that matters, or perhaps even its saltiness.*
In any case, rather than random bad behaviour it may be that
the penguins lack of toilet training is an evolutionary adaption to
their environment. To test the idea that it’s the darkness of the
guano that makes a difference, small plastic discs of varying
colour had been left in front of the cameras so the team could see
whether they too sank into the snow before the rest melted. This
is careful experimental science in the field, enabled by the ability
of the camera network to be there for a significant period of time
instead of simply making a flying visit.
Interesting things happen when you have a network of camera
poles in the Antarctic that happen to have batteries and regular
* This last idea is my favourite, as it means the penguins are essentially salting the icy paths around their homes, just as we do.
142 Too Many Penguins
visits. Tom is slowly accreting a network of other scientists who
are interested in his sites; many of the cameras we visited were
newly adorned with small test tubes halfway up the pole. These
are pollen traps, collecting the slow drift of material from the air
here in a plantless desert precisely because that guarantees an
unbiased sample. Colleagues of mine have even talked of con-
verting penguinology stations into detectors for cosmic rays,
high-energy particles coming from space.
While running about from camera to camera, and sitting
exhausted on the ship thinking only about the next day’s efforts,
it was easy to close my eyes and imagine myself on a great scien-
tific voyage, exploring the last of the Earth’s great wildernesses
(Figure 21). Yet people have been travelling to the Antarctic for all sorts of reasons for a long while now; even before I opened my
Figure 21 A moody day in the Antarctic, with penguins, ice, and our expedition ship in the background.
Too Many Penguins 143
eyes and reminded myself I was on board a tourist-carrying
cruise ship it was obvious from visiting that the Antarctic
Peninsula is hardly untouched by human hands. While the still-
unforgiving climate, especially the bitter winters, is always going
to prevent large-scale immigration, on my trip alone there was
plenty of evidence of the use to which human beings have put
this great wilderness.
One of the indelible memories I took from the Antarctic
adventure is of sailing into a safe harbour known as Deception
Island. The island is the rim of an active volcano which pokes
above the waves, with its central caldera flooded and a run of flat
beaches around the inner rim that provided a site, less than a cen-
tury ago, for a whaling factory. This whole region was, in the first
few decades of the
twentieth century, the centre of a trade in seals
and whales that butchered now-unspeakable numbers of ani-
mals in the Southern Ocean. As a result, the sights of Deception
Island include not only rocky peaks and the bluest water you’ve
seen, but also enormous rusting vats that used to contain oil pro-
duced by boiling down gigantic carcasses. The vats stand next to
rusting bits of dock, designed to service the whaling boats which
used to be based here.
The whaling trade didn’t survive long. Just a few decades after
exploration opened up the Antarctic to fortune-seeking adven-
turers, business collapsed under the twin pressures of the depres-
sion of the 1930s and a fundamentally unstable business; the
unfortunate fact is that by then so many animals had been killed
that there were few left to profitably hunt. Antarctic exploitation
isn’t just a problem for the past, though, and with little data available on how we were affecting our surroundings we modern
visitors could not afford to be smug. The presence of tourists in
Antarctica is both growing and strictly controlled, almost to an
absurd degree. Granted access to the bridge as part of my role as
144 Too Many Penguins
a (very) junior penguinologist, I listened in amazement as the
crew of the three or four cruise ships in the area negotiated pas-
sage and landing sites. Partly they were avoiding landing too
many people in any one place—and I should say that everyone I
saw was scrupulous in following Antarctic Treaty rules that
limited the number of people on shore at one time—but they
were also keen to provide the wilderness experience sought by
their guests. Our departure from the quiet harbour of Deception
Island, for example, was timed so that no one on board saw the
next ship slipping in to enjoy an unspoilt experience of an aban-
doned Antarctic whaling station.
If I sound cynical, I don’t mean to. Many of the most moving
aspects of the trip for me were the traces of previous human, or
at least scientist, occupation. On one stop I was moved to tears
by an empty, stone-walled enclosure that didn’t even deserve the
term ‘hut’, but which was built by scientists far from home
searching for a magnetic pole that turned out to be on the other
side of the continent. Tom, meanwhile, was in a spirit of not-
The Crowd and the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse Page 17
