Antarctica (10 page)

I was glad Zachary still had spirit. But something about the way he was pushing up against the wire made me want to bust him and all the other emperors out of the place. And yet, if I pulled down the fence, they would simply walk on to another patch of identical ice and do exactly what they were doing now. They were not humans. They were animals. I must not anthropomorphise them. Regardless of the presence of the fence, they were currently behaving just as nature intended.

I shook myself mentally and tried to pay attention. Paul was now telling me what he did with the penguins. Knowing that they had to come back here at the end of every dive meant he could attach sophisticated measuring devices to the birds, and recover the data when they returned. He glued on those Velcro strips with epoxy resin, then attached mini backpacks containing instruments that measured, for instance, the oxygen in their lungs and blood. ‘As long as the backpack doesn't wobble, the birds don't mind,' Paul said. ‘Unless you work with these birds you don't realise how strong they are. The backpack is nothing to them—it weighs less than two pounds.' But what about the Velcro strip? ‘No problem. When they moult, they lose theVelcro and the glue, too.'

And the whole point of this effort was to follow these creatures underwater. Emperors are the most accomplished divers of all Antarctic birds—they can plunge to an amazing 1,500 feet below the surface and stay down for fifteen minutes, holding their breath all the way. To do this, they have developed some bizarre Antarctic adaptations. They slow down their heart rate and reduce their metabolism so dramatically that they end up diving in what to us would seem like a coma. They also have to eke out what little oxygen they have in their lungs, drip-feeding it to their muscles to make it last.

Paul's backpacks sought to measure all of this by recording the birds' oxygen levels at every stage of the dive. ‘We can see how low the oxygen goes,' Paul said. And on the longer dives, his instruments showed that the penguins were returning on empty. By the time they judged the size of their hole, adjusted their swimming speed and shot back up into the air they had almost no oxygen left to speak of. ‘They can function at the very far end, at levels so low that we would pass out.'
¹⁷

In principle, Paul just wanted to understand how the birds achieve all this. But there could even be some kind of human application. Oxygen is powerful stuff. We breathe it to get enough energy from our muscles to be big and vigorous but, untamed, it can also tear our bodies' cells to shreds. In human heart attacks and strokes, oxygen gets temporarily shut off, but the real damage happens when the gas comes flooding back in unchecked. When these birds took their first breaths back in the air after a long dive, they had to be able to handle going instantaneously from zero to plenty. Maybe the penguins had some kind of special antioxidants. Maybe there was something we could borrow.

To the side of the hut was the entrance to the ‘Observation tube', a cylinder sunk through the sea ice, which could give you a hint of the emperors' underwater world. From the surface it looked like a wide plastic chimney painted hospital green. Paul hefted off the wooden cover and I stepped gingerly in, feeling with my feet for the triangular hoops that served as a stepladder. For the first time I realised how thick the sea ice here was. I had accepted the idea that we could drive on it, build huts on it, land planes on it, but still it was shocking to climb down three feet, six feet, ten, fifteen and not have reached the water.

By the time I arrived at the bottom of the tube, where there were Perspex windows and a viewing platform, I was shivering in the dank coldness. A ghostly green light was filtering through the thick overhead ice, just enough to make out the many penguins in the water around me. I was astonished by the way they moved. On the surface they were sinuous and graceful and a little bit slow, so in the water I had half expected them to be like seals, writhing and balletic. But no. They were torpedoes. They were bullets. Whoosh! They ripped past me, leaving only a trace of tiny bubbles in their wake. Like shooting stars they were there, and then they were gone.

 

Dumont d'Urville, the main French base in Antarctica, is a haven for penguin researchers. Not only is it built around an Adélie colony, but it is also the only year-round station on the entire continent that has an emperor penguin colony within strolling distance. The movie
The March of the Penguins
was filmed there, and French scientists have been studying their imperial neighbours continuously since 1956.

The base lies more than 1,500 miles south of Hobart, at the very edge of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, and the usual way to get there is by sea. Long-suffering French Antarcticans sail back and forth between Hobart and DDU, as the locals call it, on a notorious little ship. The
Astrolabe
is bright green and plucky and 200 feet long, with a rounded hull that helps prevent her from being crushed in the pack ice but does little or nothing for her stability as she lurches through the big seas of the roaring forties and the furious fifties. The journey south can take anything between five and ten days, while waves lash the windows all the way up to the bridge, the ship yaws and rolls and most people lie in their beds, groaning weakly and trying not to think of food.

Luckily for me, there was another way. The French had an agreement with the Italians to share the use of a Twin Otter plane each summer season. It usually flew between the Italian and French bases, but if I had not mistaken a crackly HF radio conversation, it would swing by McMurdo to pick me up and fly me and a couple of other passengers over to DDU.

The plane was piloted by a cheerful Canadian called Bob Heath, who looked like a dark-haired Santa Claus. He was bearded, and rotund, with a booming belly laugh and an irreverent line in pre-flight briefings. ‘You have the usual choice between too hot and too cold. If you're too hot or too cold let us know. We won't change anything, but we'll look sympathetic.' (I learned later that he spoke both French and Italian fluently but with equally atrocious accents, and that everybody loved him.)

The temperature on board might not have been perfect (too hot, in this case, and we all ended up stripping off most of our compulsory cold-weather gear) but the flight itself was gorgeous. We passed over the sepia mountains and sweeping glaciers of the Dry Valleys before hitting the blank white slate of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The first sign that we were reaching the coast was a set of crevasses running in parallel lines as the ice sheet began to feel the sloping of the rock beneath. As the ground steepened, the ice became stippled and tinged with blue until it terminated abruptly in great white cliffs that reminded me, incongruously, of the chalk cliffs of Dover.

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.