Emperor Penguins

December 4, 2008

I will never forget this day!

We visited an Emperor Penguin nesting area. With iceaxes and crampons, Michelle, Kirsten and I trekked a couple miles over sea ice, snowfields, and scree slopes to reach the colony, which is tucked into a sheltered cove in the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. We counted how many Emperor Penguin chicks were present and took some photos for a census.

If you’ve ever watched “Happy Feet” or “March of the Penguins”, you’re familiar with Emperors. Few people ever see them firsthand, however, and fewer still experience a colony. Emperors incubate their eggs during the Antarctic winter (incredibly enough), so, now, in late spring, their chicks are as big as the adults and stand in fluffy groups on the ice. Soon, they will all head out to sea.

Emperor Penguins figure so prominently in popular media that they seem like a movie set in real life. The adults, black-and-white with splashes of orange, chest-high, are very deliberate, slow-moving creatures, unhurried in the face of Antarctic conditions. Most of them were out on feeding trips, so the colony was predominantly chicks: black and gray, fluffy in a warm coat of down, waiting around for their parents to return with food. Smaller Adelie Penguins also crisscrossed the area, on journeys of their own, and a couple Weddell Seals lounged next to holes in the ice.

With walls of the ice shelf rising sheer on one side, snow-covered mountains of Ross Island on the other, and alien-looking Emperor Penguins bunched all around, the scene was prehistoric and timeless. If you didn’t have a watch, you couldn’t be sure if you existed in this millennium, or the one before, or the one before that. Things haven’t changed too much for the Emperors in a long, long time.