Free Antarctica by Gabrielle Walker Page A

krill. The researchers know this, David told me, because in the past they spent a lot of time making the penguins regurgitate.
    â€˜You pump them full of water, then you tip them upside down,’ he said. ‘It would take three goes to empty their stomach and we only did it once, so we left them plenty of food. We don’t do it any more. It was distressing for both the researchers and the animals. It violated their sense of self.’
    â€˜Their sense of
self?’
    â€˜They definitely have a sense of self, an aura of penguinhood. We try not to do anything that another penguin won’t do. They behave towards you as if you’re a large penguin. If you come close to their nest they will treat you like any penguin and peck you. Their beaks are very sharp and they whack you on the shins with their flippers. But if you pick them up, no part of their normal life is in the air. When we attach the transmitters we try to trap them between our feet. We’d only pick them up as a last resort.’
    â€˜What are they like to touch?’ I asked him.
    â€˜If they’re fluffed out, the feathers are soft, but if they’re in sleek mode, they’re almost like scales,’ he said. ‘They’re very vigorous and extremely strong and they squirm a lot. They’re mostly bone and muscle. The bones are solid, unlike other birds, and the muscles are huge for all that swimming and walking so they’re really hard to hold. You have to grab both of their feet, tuck their head in your armpit so their eyes are covered, and hold them like a football.’
    I risked a more personal question. ‘Why do you do all this?’
    â€˜I dunno, I’m just interested in seabirds and the ocean and the . . . um . . . what you might call the romance.’ He was warming up now. ‘It’s the idea of this vast ocean with these warm-blooded creatures that are pretty much in the same boat as some humans except they’ve figured things out a little bit better. In a way humans have totally trashed the oceans, whereas birds have solved it because, you know, they fit in. They don’t try to change it.’
    â€˜How have humans changed it?’
    â€˜Well, we’ve removed the highest predators from all the other oceans. The whales, seals, cod, pollack, tuna, swordfish, sharks are all gone. If you have predators, there are long-lived creatures that eat the surpluses and coast during the troughs of food supply, so you get a stable system—one that doesn’t swing so wildly from one extreme to the other.’
    So according to David, because the Ross Sea still had birds and whales and seals and predatory fish, this was the only place on Earth where the ocean was behaving as it was supposed to.
    â€˜It’s truly wild,’ I suggested.
    â€˜Yes, it is wild. It’s all out there in full view. There are no secrets. Penguins can’t hide and they don’t question anything. But you can ask them questions, and if you’re creative enough you can find the answers.’
    â€˜Do you like the other kind of wildness—the elemental kind?’
    Again, he paused to consider the question.
    â€˜I don’t want dangerous. I’m not looking for an adrenalin buzz,’ he said. ‘But I do like Cape Crozier, which is famous for its wind. The weather there is really localised. You can sit in a place where it’s calm and see a raging hurricane, just a couple of miles away; it’s like a grey cloud zipping over the Ross Ice Shelf and turning the ocean into a white froth.’
    â€˜Have you ever been out in a bad storm?’
    â€˜Yes. A couple of times. You can be standing there in total calm and suddenly there are seventy-knot winds knocking you off your feet. One time, when I was a grad student, a storm had been blowing for like three days. When the winds finally stopped I donned my gear and ran down to the beach to check how the penguins were