When wildlife photographer Lindsay McCrae was offered the chance to spend a winter in Antarctica filming Emperor Penguins for the BBC series Dynasties, he was newly married. He did his best to set the stage, and soften the blow, but when he told his wife it would be eleven months, she blew up. Given time to review, nearly two weeks later she told him it would be OK, they could work it out.
In My Penguin Year: Life Among the Emperors, McCrae takes us with him on his journey to the literal end of the Earth. A BBC program on Emperor Penguins had sparked his desire to photograph wildlife when he was a pre-teen, and now his ambition, to film the next documentary on their entire courting, breeding, and chick-raising season, was to be fulfilled.
Nothing can prepare someone for a year in Antarctica. Summers are brutal; the rest of the year grades from dreadful to impossible. He and two companions were stationed at Neumayer III, a German research station that sits on stilts atop an ice shelf in Atka Bay. The station may host 60 or more researchers and support crew in the summertime, but only 12 will overwinter. The place is ideal because it is within just a couple of miles of a section of the bay that freezes over thickly and then hosts a colony of 10,000 Emperor Penguins.
The author felt under enormous pressure to capture every behavior in which the birds engage. We read a lot about his volatile feelings as the comparatively balmy late summer weather turned to alternating storms and clear, but colder and colder weather as winter approached. He and his helpers needed to wait, and wait, and wait, for the sea ice to get thick enough for them to get to the birds. Only once the authorities deemed it safe could they actually begin filming penguins. Until then, McCrae had to content himself with framing footage of other things going on, plus icebergs, other sea birds flying about, and the occasional seal.
In addition, shortly before he left for Antarctica, his wife informed him she was pregnant, and he had to cope with his feelings about that. Modern technology allowed them to talk almost daily, which is a great improvement over worrying about one's child being born halfway across the planet, waiting for the mails to arrive (at Neumayer III, there is no mail service for six months!).
They managed to get onto the ice in time to film courtship behavior, mating, and eventually, egg-laying. Once the egg is laid, a female will carry it on her feet for a day or two, and almost reluctantly transfer it to her mate's feet. Then she scoots off to the sea some thirty miles to the north, to fatten up for the hatching and the intense feeding period that follows.
At -40° (where C and F scales are the same), mercury freezes, and so do you. So does some camera equipment. Then it gets colder. The men all suffered a lot from being out there with the penguins during "milder" days, where they actually had a fighting chance to live through the conditions and get safely back to the station.
One interesting bit of behavior amused me: when the wind blows strongly from one side, the huddle of 5,000 incubating males moves slowly downwind. Birds on the upwind side, when they've had enough, work their way around the huddle to the lee side. When the weather clears, they make their way back to a spot near to where they were, but one less stained by their droppings. Surprisingly, when the cold is not quite so deep, penguins in the center of the huddle may begin to show signs of distress and squawk. They are overheating—the others pull back to let them cool off!
More than sixty days after the females left, they begin to return. Some chicks will have already hatched. The rest hatch over a couple of weeks. The pairs find one another again, and once the infant bird can be safely transferred, the female takes over. The males, who have lost half their weight, scoot north to feed. Once they return, a round-robin of feeding chicks and feeding themselves ensues until the chicks are old enough for both parents to be away at once for short feeding trips.
There is a picture very like this in the book, but a printing error made it unusable here. This one is from this website by Art Wolfe.
Not all the chicks, and not all the adults, live through the late winter and spring. At one point a gully opened up by shifting ice partly filled with snow. Penguins began going down to get out of the wind and were trapped. They and their chicks would have died there. After a day of discussions and soul-searching, the film crew intervened with shovels and made a ramp for them to escape. The rescue is documented in this video, clipped from the documentary Dynasties:Emperor, the fruit of McCrae's work. When hatching and raising season ended, in November, the filmmakers could return home. McCrae had an infant son to bond with.
This has to be my favorite natural history book this year. It documents the incredible accomplishments of McCrae and his colleagues and friends Will Lawson and Stefan Christmann. While Antarctic work is much less dangerous than it was a half century or more ago, it is still arduous, exhausting, very dangerous, and utterly chilling. One cannot wear enough gear to prevent at least a bit of frost nip or frostbite. Hats off to these blokes!
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