Dear readers,
Once again we had a week-long storm; it was bitter cold, made worse by the windchill, and the howling winds never seemed to stop. The snowdrifts flew every which way, while the ice crystals, given their tiny size, even found their way in the cracks around our “front door” – producing small drifts in the entrance area and necessitating a bit of indoor snow shovelling. When the wind factor reaches 12 (hurricane), we don’t dare set foot outdoors; at such times, we attend to indoor tasks and feel how the station around us rocks slightly. Outside all heck has broken loose, the wind is roaring and without a sturdy roof over our heads, we’d be done for. At times like these, we inevitably think of our neighbours, the emperor penguins, who are standing out on the ice in these gale-force winds – brooding their eggs.
We’ve known “our” penguins for seven months now. Back in the Antarctic summer month of January, they were still scattered all over the place, waiting for their moulting to be complete. Once they all had their new, waterproof plumage, they disappeared into the water, to fill up on calories for the coming winter. In fact, some of them got so plump that they had trouble just getting around. Every now and then, we’d see them swimming, diving or splashing about from our vantage point near the ice edge. When winter came, the bay gradually froze over, and the penguins began gathering as a single large colony on the sea ice.
We’ve had the chance to observe it all – even “marriage proposals”, followed by “engagements” that last for at least a year. The two penguins stand there and gaze at one another for minutes at a time – talk about romantic! We seem to have missed the egg-laying phase, but at some point we noticed the colony was smaller, most likely because the females weren’t there. Later, looking a bit worse for wear, they handed off their eggs to the males. While the males kept the eggs warm, the females migrated to the water to finally feed again; once they were sated and had built up new fat reserves, they relieved the males, tending to the new chicks. To keep the eggs warm, the males place them on top of their “heated” feet and cover them with a fold of abdominal skin. They can even walk about with the eggs; you can see it in their cautious waddling, with their tummies bent down and their feet scrunched up a bit. It can be somewhat nerve-wracking to watch: if the egg were to fall out and be exposed to the cold for just one or two minutes, the chick inside would die. Thankfully, the penguins seem to know what they’re doing.
This goes on for a full two months, which is itself brutal, and precisely during the Polar Night and Antarctic winter. When we’re trying to ride out battering storms or prolonged temperatures down to -40°C with windchill, it’s hard to imagine that the penguins are all right. But they are! We’ve seen it with our own eyes. Well, truth be told, we heard it first: a cheerful, bright chirping that clearly differed from the standard, incessant noise produced by the colony. And then we saw them, too: tiny, practically naked chicks, nestled snug as a bug under their daddies’ “potbellies”. Every now and then, the males lift their abdomens and their chicks curiously peer at the world around them or look hungrily straight up – since that’s where their fathers regurgitate partially digested food into their little mouths. After months in the cold and dark, seeing these tender, fragile and virtually naked chicks is almost surreal. Despite their lack of plumage and the frigid cold, they don’t seem to have a care in the world. They’re truly a miracle of nature!
All penguin photos were taken from a safe distance using a telephoto lens.