Ice Stories dispatches from polar scientists

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David Ainley has been working with Adélie penguins at four different colonies on the Ross Sea of Antarctica for more than 25 years. He's a biologist for H. T. Harvey and Sons and is a leading expert on how these resilient birds respond to environmental change.

All Posts By David Ainley

No Sea Ice in Sight

By David Ainley • January 13th, 2008
Since coming back from Cape Bird it’s been very gray and windy here at Cape Royds. It has been blowing 20 knots at least, and often the wind has been much stronger. Climate change predictions or realities, I know, are totally abstract to the vast,…
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Snowed In

By David Ainley • January 12th, 2008
We just weathered two, plus, days of ‘white out’. That’s when there’s so much snow in the air that you can’t see more than a few meters ahead, especially if you’re located where there is snow on the ground. Then everything is white, everywhere you…
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Melting Glacial Torrents

By David Ainley • December 23rd, 2007
We paid a visit to Cape Bird to begin a pilot project to assess the hemoglobin and hematocrit (red blood cell count) levels of penguins. In the past we’ve found that there are marked differences in the diving/foraging behavior of penguins, and often this translates…
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Hatching Eggs

By David Ainley • December 17th, 2007
Today the first eggs hatched here at Cape Royds, a few days later than the timing of this event last year. The colony is eerily quiet. Seems like there should be some young birds beginning to show up to investigate the colony for future breeding.…
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Incubating Penguin Eggs and Melting Ice

By David Ainley • December 3rd, 2007
The penguins are deep in thought incubating their eggs. The fast ice that we can see out our front door is beginning to break apart. Pieces the size of football fields are breaking off and the edge of the ice is retreating southward. Whereas 50%…
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Weddell Seals in Erebus Bay

By David Ainley • November 28th, 2007
Today we conducted an aerial survey of Weddell seals in Erebus Bay. Our project doesn’t usually spend much time observing seals, other than leopard seals that prey on penguins, but last summer we submitted a protocol about counting seals to the folks who control industrial…
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Whales and Penguins

By David Ainley • November 26th, 2007
I guess I might as well show you, the reader, what the view is from the other direction. This picture wasn’t taken from the RacTent, which is hiding behind a hill and snowdrift to offer us a bit of protection from the southerly blasts.…
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Thanksgiving at the Penguin Colony

By David Ainley • November 23rd, 2007
Well, let’s see, it was chicken and oriental rice for Thanksgiving dinner yesterday eve, and a rousing blizzard outside. Only in the evening, though. As I mentioned before, there's a lot of open water in McMurdo Sound this spring, and the reason is related to…
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Penguins on the Scale

By David Ainley • November 20th, 2007
  We’ve now got our stuff set up, including the weighbridge. This is an apparatus that identifies penguins (from the computer chip we inject under their skin) when they walk through a hoop antenna, and at the same time records their body weight. They…
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