Letter from Cape Royds, Antarctica

I’m writing from a Rac tent set on Cape Royds half a mile uphill from an Adelie penguin colony. The tent pitches and shakes in the wind of a storm that has kept me tent bound for four days. When I woke at eight in my tent, snow padding the walls, I heard a helicopter, the distinct whop-chop-whop of the bird that will, eventually, haul us out of here. I bolted upright in my sleeping bag and scrambled into clothes and coat in disbelief and, I’ll admit, some excitement. That they could land in such weather (today, 45 mph gusts) seemed amazing. I could barely see the Rac tent from my small camp tent and it stands but fifty yards away. But the helo did not land

and so we’ll have another day ofwriting, reading, idle conversation in this space that is but 12X25 with one small heater that keeps us in warm enough at about 55 degrees. I wear three layers of clothing pretty constantly. When I first arrived on the Ice I wanted really cold temperatures and to experience a big storm, a condition one storm—these things would test my Antarctic toughness. And now I’ve got my storm.

We here at Cape Royds on Ross Island is me, David Ainley, penguinologist, and his intern assistant Jen. He’s been down here twenty-two seasons and is Mr. Penguin. He’s a long legged, grey bearded, bespectacled man who speaks and listens only when necessary. One night, after a few glasses of wine, he said, “I’m not a good conversationalist,” which is a bit of an understatement. Yet when he gives in to a grin he’s completely enchanting. In our email correspondence he’s been welcoming and warm so I was at first a bit surprised by his reticence. But I don’t need him to talk much: I’ve read his book on penguins, listened to him lecture in McMurdo and get what he’s saying not just about penguins but the ecosystem of the waters in the Ross Sea. It’s all a bit frightening, thinking about how this odd, precarious world is so easily unbalanced, potentially destroyed so easily by whale hunting, or by fishing Antarctic Cod.

Jen is the woman you want on your team, whatever the team is—she could do anything. She’s tall, pulls her blond hair back in a pony tail, is smart and strong (from time to time she launches into pull ups on the frame of the tent), and relentlessly good humored. She’s 26 and spent a few years working in McMurdo before switching over to the science side of things this year. That involves following David around, counting penguin, penguin chicks, locating the bands, which they place on about four hundred chicks a year here at Royd, and in general shadowing him in his work, which is to look at the ecology of the penguin.

I arrived here on Monday, one of those ridiculously beautiful Antarctic days—searing sun, visibility to the horizon. Paul, my helo pilot, is a tall, thin British boy, who flew me over the exact route Cherry-Gerard, Wilson and Bowers followed from Hut Point to Cape Crozier in the dark of an Antarctic night to collect emperor penguin eggs. This journey is the “worst journey” of the title of Cherry-Gerrard’s famous book on Scott’s last expedition: The Worst Journey in the World. We crossed the Ross Ice Shelf, rounded Erebus and dropped down onto the camp at Crozier. That this took us twenty seven minutes and not three weeks baffled me. We only had enough time there to load up Jen and David and then we were whisked off to Royds. Arriving there, I was disoriented. In essence, I had flown the circumference of Ross Island, with Erebus now behind me, McMurdo Bay in front of me and across it the Dry Valleys and New Harbor.

David helped me set up my tent. He kept hauling enormous chunks of rock over to secure the fly and I kept thinking: why make such a fuss, nothing is going to happen. It is perhaps easy to become relaxed here, after days of good weather; clearly that is never a good idea. I’ve had to dig out my tent a few times a day and reattach many of the fly lines. In the tent I have an enormous sleeping bag with a fleece liner and two pads—this keeps me quite warm. After tent set up we headed down to the colony.

Cape Royds is where Shackleton settled his 1907 Nimrod expedition and with good reason: a deep harbor in Backdoor bay, open ground, and a freshwater lake, named Pony Lake, for his ponies. His hut is in the shelter of the wind, unlike ours. When we arrived, there was another helicopter just down the hill, near Shackleton’s Hut and a pack of tourists that had been shuttled in from their ship, which we could see in the distance. I followed David down to the penguin colony, on a worn trail through the dark, basalt from Erebus and past the tourists in their orange parkas taking pictures from the top of the cliffs. As we strode past the signs that read: Do not enter, Area of Special Scientific Interest, I felt grateful I was in Antarctica with the National Science Foundation and not as a tourist. And suddenly, without warning, I was amidst about 1,500 Adelie penguins. Well.

Penguins in person are everything that I imagined: comical and engaging, as they move about, determinedly taking a rock to build their nest, or walking purposefully from one place to another and tripping over small boulders. Out on the pack ice, which is breaking up, they move more gracefully, tobogganing along, then diving in the water. I could watch them swimming in Pony Lake as well, and their speed and grace is lovely, like the finest breast stroker popping out of the water then gliding underwater.

But there is another side to penguins that I had never imagined. They are not all neat and tidy in their black and white tuxedos—many have guano smeared onto their white chests, or blood trickling down their sides from a recent battle. I’m struck at once by the fragility of their lives here on this wind-swept area and the violence of it. Obviously, this comes mostly from the elements. Adelies nest high up, to keep from being buried in snow and so that their nests don’t get flooded, but in addition they have a real land predator: skuas. These large scavenging birds, a relative of the gull, are constantly hovering, ready to steal eggs and chicks. Cracked egg shells litter the ground, and most of the eggs from this year, abandoned by hungry penguins, have been eaten by the skuas. Carcasses of freeze dried penguin chicks abound, legs twisted in awkward positions. Or a foot of a chick lies abandoned, the only thing the skua won’t eat.

Yesterday when we finally ventured out I witnessed a real slaughter. A skua took a fairly good sized chick by the scruff of the neck and, unable to lift it and cart it off, dragged it away from the nest. Adelies nest in clusters within sub-colonies as protection—often you can see them, beaks in the air, stabbing at a skua who is trying to land. But in this case, there was open land and the skua got in there. Joined by a hungry mate, the skuas slowly tore the chick apart before my eyes, an excruciating slow process during which the chick continued to peep and try to flee, flesh exposed, with no success. It’s blood, so red against its downy grey feathers, appeared in patches and then eventually there was more red than grey. When they were done the snow was splattered red with blood.

Beyond outside threats there is the violence amongst the penguins themselves. There is little open ground here in the Antarctic and so spots such as this one at Royds are prime penguin real estate. Stones are also at a premium. Seems both people and penguins fight for property and here it’s manifested in aggressive establishment of nesting space. They want to be close enough for protection but far enough apart that they can’t peck their neighbors. To establish this distance isn’t easy and involves a raucous fight amongst pairs. The noise is astounding, and something Shackleton complained of. It begins low, like a transmission trying to turn over and as they peck at each other it gains momentum so that it is more like a donkey braying (there are jackass penguins, which really do bray). But this bray is more like a jackhammer, clanging, staccato. And below this noise the peep of the chicks. If space isn’t established in this manner, fights break out, and when they are chasing each other it is not in some gleeful game—they are out for blood, territory. The sulfurous smell of penguin guano surrounds everything, has entered into my ears and my clothes, and the colony rests on a very thick layer of guano, the ground piss-brown against the black rock. So the world of penguins is not picture postcard lovely, and yet, of course, I’m completely taken with these funny, tenacious little birds.

That first day in the colony I stood amongst the penguins for about five hours, just watching and completely enraptured. I had no idea what David or Jen were doing, writing their numbers in their little orange books. Yesterday, when the storm calmed and we were all stir crazy, we headed out for a few hours and I helped David by writing numbers in his book. Using binoculars, he read the numbers from the stainless steel bands he has placed on them as chicks. He’s determining if penguins return to a colony or to the same nest. Turns out they are not fully faithful penguins—to their mates or to their nests, but rather seize the moment, because the moments are rare. The penguins were surrounded by snow and at times I could not see them because they were half buried, their black backs mounded up like a rock. It seems like this is some sort of protective coloring, but in fact they don’t need it on land, only in water, where they are “invisible” from below with their white bellies and hard to see from above with their black backs. The first day, I walked about three feet away from the penguins. Since they have not been hunted in years they do not see people as a real threat, though they begin a growl if you get too close. But yesterday a penguin walked right up to me, inches away, and I asked what he wanted. He stood there, all two and a half feet of him, and swayed and looked at me with those round, unblinking pale eyes, and did not answer.

There are two sub-colonies that are fenced off and then penguins, clever as they are, enter and exit through a little bridge. This bridge is a fantastic electronic scale and detector that notes their number that is encoded on an injected tags. Their weights are recorded as they come and go. The whole thing runs off solar power, and as David explained, the two men who set up the computer program are geniuses who took three seasons to get all of the technology right.

Late in the day yesterday David decided to put tags in the penguins who were nesting with chicks and so began my work as a penguinologist. Jen grabbed the penguins, wrapping them into her arms like a chicken (they weigh about nine to ten pounds and come football shaped) while I came in, marked the nests with a stake that I pounded into the ground, and covered the chicks with a canvas bag, weighted down with stones so that they would not be harassed by neighbors and so that they would not run off. No one was particularly pleased with this process—the penguins would try and fend us off and as I kneeled to cover the chicks, nearby penguins would peck at me (since I had on my usual three layers, top to bottom, I felt nothing). Only one chick tried to flee, and I scooped him up and placed him back in his comfy stone lair. For the final of the ten birds I got to pick up mama or papa, and hold him/her while David injected the bird. The bird weighed about nine or ten pounds and felt like a solid football tucked under my arm. Holding that warm, soft penguin, its flipper faintly beating me, was truly miraculous. Maybe it is simply being that close to something so wild. For hours after I was elated. My hands and body smelled of penguin and I did not want to wash it off, though in fact we do not wash at all (in dire situations, we use moist towelettes).

My second day here I visited Shackleton’s hut, down the hill from where we are in our tent. Though there is a power to entering a place that is still fresh with the lives of these men, I was less moved than I imagined. Maybe it’s because Shackleton is not my man. Everyone in the Antarctic has read their Scott and Shackleton, and in McMurdo you can quote from either and people smile, knowing what you are referring to. Everyone holds their hero dear. Scott people are romantics, Shackleton want high adventure but a safe return. Amundsen people are rare—they are the ultra efficient, the ones who will get the job done with no fuss. David is an Amundsen man. Of course.

Inside there were tins of corn flour (“made from rice” ) cabbage and parsnips left over (“not even the skuas will eat parsnips,” David commented) and full hams hanging from the wall. There are biscuits, broken in a wooden crate and shoes left under a bench, curling at the toes, the soles separating. A reindeer sleeping bag stretches across one cot in the open room, and suspended from the high ceiling are two Nansen sledges though when Shackleton was there the dining table hung to allow for more room. I marveled at their tenacity, at their strength, but I’ve done that from afar. Maybe, in fact, seeing their hut made me marvel less: their home practical, their daily life clear. Surviving here is a matter of day to day and they were very methodical, had food and warmth and a clear job to do. Though clearly the physical side of Antarctic life has softened enormously, keeping the mind occupied is the trick, and remains the trick. The early explorers gave lectures and staged performances and played their pianolas. The same remains for us: we read and discuss books and talk about penguins. I am responsible for my own happiness; everyone here knows that. The food supply is low, but so is our book supply. It’s the end of the latter that worries me the most.

So here I am, sitting in the Rac tent, trying to stay warm. The Rac tent (a Kiwi invention) is a fairly utilitarian place, with a two burner stove top, a propane heater that for some reason we keep on low except when Jen and I decide it really is too cold, and little decoration except three postcards sent to David. There’s a sticker on one door with an American flag that says: God less America. In one corner a machine tells us temps inside and out, wind speed, wind chill factor (highest wind speed has been 45 but at the pass where I was blown over David says the wind must be at least 65). We consult this about a hundred times a day. There we also have our communications with the outside world—we call in every night to tell Mac Ops how many souls are here and that we are ok. We also speak daily to David’s researchers at Cape Crozier, who have had 100 mile winds and have lost three tents. Oddly, we have email, through a satellite, and an iridium phone. At one point David called his mother, who must, I am convinced, still be wondering what it is her son does down here every year. (“Oh, you know, they’re being penguins,” he said at one point.) He never let on that he was sitting in the eye of a storm—there’s a good son. When we aren’t reading or writing email we stand at the doors (one at either end) and stare out the plastic windows, and speculate on the weather (“seems to be letting up” is the constant refrain, when it isn’t “it’s clouded over again”) though most of the time we can’t even see out the window. We are eating well enough but I’d love to see something that looked like a vegetable. Most of the food supplies expired in 2002 including the wheat thins that seem to be keeping me alive.

So this is where we’ve sat for four days, the canvas walls flexing and snapping. The stove rattles with the movement and from time to time ice chunks scuttle across the roof, sounding like squirrels at work. Even the difficulties seem marvelous. I am happy.