South Polar Skua.

This large aggressive bird is an opportunist. When the seals haul out on the ice and give birth to their pups the Skuas hang around and eat the after birth. At McMurdo Research station they will wait for people to leave the dining hall with a sandwich or cookie in their hand and swoop down for the ‘kill.’ When it’s time for them to breed many build their nests at the edge of penguin colonies where first the penguin eggs then the chicks can be easy pickings among the penguin parents who are just beginning.

Skuas, tag teaming a penguin to get the egg.

Adult Adélie Penguins can defend themselves so are safe from Skua attack. However, while the penguins are nesting, and before the Skuas lay their own eggs, the Skuas work in pairs, one will fly overhead to distract the Adélie and the other will swoop in and snatch the egg or chick as the penguin stretches to peck at the decoy. Often times when I’ve been sitting watching this, I wish that the penguins would someday take revenge.

The Skuas often build their nest close to the Adélie breeding colony so they do not have to go far for their food. But in the following sets of pictures you can see this Skua was very bold, laying the egg within 10 feet of nesting Adélies. At first the Adélies would walk by with only passing interest in the nesting Skua but finally one penguin decided this was too close and challenged the Skua.

A Skua nest very close to a group of Adélie Penguins.

Some penguins would walk by without paying attention to the intruder.

First a challenge.

Then the Skua is evicted from the nest.

Every attempt by the Skua to return to its nest was thwarted by the penguin.

Finally the egg was lost to other Skuas.

Skuas are no match for adult Adélie penguins so the Skua moved off the egg. The penguin did not chase the Skua but stood at the nest and did not allow the Skua to return. Every attempt by the Skua to return to the egg was thwarted, and meanwhile the Skua egg was getting colder by the minute.

Skuas are indeed opportunist eaters. Even exposed Skua eggs are taken. This egg was no exception and once the penguin walked off, with in a few minutes another Skua made this egg its meal. The Skuas abandoned this nest site and will likely build one a much safer distance away next time. Penguins 1 – Skua 0.

Penguins sitting on eggs. In the right-most picture the very busy mate has continued to bring rocks to the nest, to place them on top of the snow.

When storms come the penguin will not leave their nests. To do so would mean their eggs would be blown away or freeze very quickly. During the storm they sit quietly with their face to the wind and wait for it to be over.

Adélie Penguins seem to have a strong sense of where their nest site is even if it is covered with snow! For this group, their sites from last year are under 3 feet of snow. Not discouraged, they simply built their nests on top of the snow pile. How this will affect the egg and chick brooding, hatching and rearing as the snow melts, we are going to find out.

This pair returned to find their long time nest site covered with snow. Instead of building on top of the snow they decided to move elsewhere and found a cozy nest site with a couple of large rocks for protection from the Skuas about 12 meters away. This is nest #3 in our Nest Check and you can follow them throughout the breeding season by seeing the daily pictures here.

Because of their body heat some of the birds are sinking into the snow pile as the days go by. This bird, below, built his nest on top of the pile, but as you can see he is slowly sinking into a larger and larger hole. He is on a nest of a few rocks with two eggs under him. When the female came back it was a challenge to do the nest exchange. We will observe and record the success of this nest.

When the sun comes out and the snow melts, there are small streams everywhere. Small depressions (scrapes) where penguins have built nests in the past fill up with water. This makes it harder to build the nest and the penguins need more rocks. A successful nest will be high enough to keep the egg out of any water run off. The egg will not hatch if it is sitting in freezing water.

The penguins on the left have a challenge to build a dry nest above the water. The third picture shows the result of a poorly built nest in the mud. The egg rolled out and moments later it was picked up by the ever watchful Skuas. The nest shown to the right is a well built nest above the mud, these eggs will be kept dry.

Adélie Penguins are sturdy birds, but stronger and more summer storms pose a challenge to their breeding success. Read how these birds are coping with the effects of climate change here.

Satellite image of McMurdo sound and the ice cover, Nov 2008, (left) vs. Nov 2009 (right).

At Cape Royds we have a ‘penguin cam’ which is a permanent structure housing a remote camera. The camera takes a picture of the colony every day as long as the solar panels generate the power to keep the batteries charged. Since the research team is not in the field all year round, this allows us to monitor what is happening at the colony when we’re not here. You can see the daily pictures at http://penguinscience.com, as well as a time-lapse of images taken over the last two years. Last year and this year the first penguins were seen the last week of October, so not much changed there, but there were fewer birds and nests being built during the first weeks this season. When we started looking for eggs the picture became even more surprising.

In 2008 the first eggs were seen on November 5th. This year we did not see eggs until November 16th. Plus the number of birds present in the colony continued to stay low. Something was keeping the penguins from arriving, building their nests and laying their eggs on the normal schedule. As the days progressed more birds started showing up and by November 25th the colony looked busy, with many nests completed and females leaving for open ocean to replenish their energy and become fat again.

An early arrival at the colony. He could have all the stones he needed so he built a large nest. Now he waits for the female to show up and guards his rocks from other males as they arrive.

The breeding season in Antarctica is very short. Adélie penguin chicks must gain the weight they need to sustain themselves through their molt to adult plumage before they are able to swim and find their own food. If the sea ice closes in around Ross Island before this happens they will have a huge task walking to open water and food. They can not swim until they have their adult plumage. We do not know what will happen this season, but that is why we are here so we can observe and record this event. We are hoping you will follow along as well.

Did you know that penguin researchers also use the satellites to track penguins when they are out in the open ocean foraging for food? See how they do this here.

Learn more about Adélie penguins at www.penguinscience.com

Catching them means we use a corral to surround the crèche and then move in hopefully herding them into the pen. Stepping inside the pen, we sort out any adults that were caught by mistake, then the smaller chicks we will not band. Now the work begins. Catch a chick, hold it between your legs, place the hard metal band around its wing and press it closed. It is very important to make sure the ends of the band are flush and together otherwise the band may interfere with the swimming ability of the bird.

This pen is used to catch the chicks. We get inside and sort out the adults and small ones, then band the big ones.

Banding the chicks. It’s important to get the band on exactly right, otherwise it will interfere with the birds swimming.

We now say good by to these chicks, leave them alone to finish their molting and find their way to the open ocean and food. Many of the adults have already left, these chicks are on their own.

These chicks have been banded. It may be two or three years before we see them again.

The adults have left these chicks to finish molting on their own.

It’s hard for us to say goodbye. The pile of equipment is the last load of the season. Our amazing helitech solves the puzzle, and still there is room for all five of us. We are covered in penguin guano, feathers and dirt after a day of banding, but feel good as this last task of the research project brings this season to an end.

The last trip of the season. All this equipment must fit into the helo, and the five of us too.

All that equipment made it; now we have to get in. It is goodbye to Cape Royds for the winter.

We heard that sound again two days ago at Cape Royds, having heard it before in January 2005, when a several square kilometer opening appeared in the fast ice just offshore in a matter of hours. The ice was dissolving, or would we call it melting?, and it was happening so fast that you could see it disappearing without even needing your imagination to be going overtime. It’s kind of like putting an ice cube in a cup of boiling tea water to watch it disappear; only here the water is just a degree above freezing. That’s plenty warm as ice goes. In 2005 the fast ice was thinner, so it went from white ice to blue water; this year it was much thicker, so for a couple of weeks it slowly turned darker shades of gray, as it took on more water. Then, fzzzzzzz.

Otherwise, except for this new patch of open water within the ice, called a polynya (a Russian word; without a doubt the Inuits have a name for this, too), there is still fast ice to the horizon as I have described in various of my previous dispatches.

The Swedish icebreaker Oden going south, very slowly, through the ice a few kilometers out in McMurdo Sound, while a polynya begins to form next to Cape Royds.

The south ‘shore’ of the polynya, the day after it initially formed, showing proximity to the Cape Royds penguin colony (tan area on left side of image). The polynya is to the right, beginning to dissolve the gray ice in the center of the image.

In fact, in the Arctic, Inuit villages — and, for that matter, seabird colonies — are located near to polynyas. And, wouldn’t you know, so are penguin colonies, although at the opposite end of the Earth. This is because polynyas allow these predators much easier access to their food. Normally, McMurdo Sound is one big polynya, and the penguins are here at Royds because of it. As I’ve been making the point in previous dispatches, the Royds penguins have been having a hard time of it this season, because their polynya didn’t form, owing to calm winds which allowed the ice to thicken until not even the strongest winds could blow it away. So, they’ve had a very long walk to get food. That is, up until a few weeks ago, when the few remaining penguins still having chicks were provided a large crack to feed in, just 4-5 km north of the colony. Now they’ve got a full-fledged, mini-polynya and all is right in the World!

Well, just like in 2005, within a day of the polynya forming, a couple of minke whales showed up in it! Where they came from, I’m not sure, but they may have followed the Oden into the ice (35 km from the fast ice edge), and then pealed off when a crack that intersected the icebreaker channel allowed them to get to the Cape Royds polynya. Maybe they heard it fizzing! Or the sounds of joyful penguins!

The minke whales, for several hours, cruised around the polynya feeding all the time. They’d submerge for 6-8 min at a time and likely were like big “Hoovers”, i.e. vacuum cleaners. Between dives, they exhaled (i.e. whale “blows”) 4-5 times, clearly audible in the still air from a kilometer away. Within a couple of hours after the whales’ arrival, the penguins’ diet switched from krill to fish. I’d been monitoring it by watching what passes between adult and chick everyday for the past few weeks. Wow! I knew that the whales could do this to the penguins, but I didn’t realize that the whales were so efficient! Not long after the whales left (they’ve not been seen for about 24 hours now) the penguins’ diet switched back to krill. Therefore, this is pretty good evidence for what we call “interference competition”. The whales certainly eat a lot but also their vacuuming causes the krill to try to escape, of course. And what krill do when being pursued, if they can, is to dive deeper and, it seems, deeper than penguins want to go, especially when there are enough fish to be had at shallower depths, though apparently not in a density that in this case would interest a minke looking for easy pickings. If the whales had vacuumed all the krill, when they left, there would be no food for the penguins. As it was, the krill ventured back up into the light (where the phytoplankton occurs that the krill eat), to then be caught by the penguins again. Both whales and penguins go for the easy meal, i.e. that nearest the surface.

Parent feeding its chick. With binoculars, if you get the right angle, usually it is possible to determine whether krill (pink) or fish (gray) is being fed to the chick.

Well, so, you’d think that maybe whales are an annoyance to Adélie penguins. As it turns out, though, minke whales are life savers! Adélie penguins, if given a choice, would always want to have minke whales around, despite the whales’ appetite and despite the best (?) efforts of the Japanese whalers. You see, minke whales — because, like Adélie penguins, they are pack ice denizens — have evolved a very long and sharp “beak”. When you see the whales in areas were the sea is freezing, it becomes quickly obvious why this is a good thing. The whales use their rostrum to break breathing holes in the new ice.

This ice is thick enough that penguins walk over it. With the whales around, though, the penguins can swim between whale breathing holes much faster than walking. In fact, several years ago, when on an icebreaker at the time of ice freeze-up in the Amundsen Sea, one day there were whales and penguins swimming around, and then the next day, with a dramatic drop in temperature and a freeze, there were whale holes but no whales or penguins. Together, they had escaped north far enough to move away from the area of freezing.

A minke whale pushing up through recently frozen sea ice, the ice around it being 4-5 cm thick.

All but one of these penguins found a hole left by a minke whale; the next whale breathing hole is just behind the lone penguin and this flock of penguins is next going to appear in that hole.

These penguins are not walking on frosted glass. They are walking on ice thick enough to support their weight, but not thick enough that a minke whale could not break a hole.

It is good for Adélie penguins to have as many minke whales around as possible. This one, like the pied piper, is making a “channel” through new ice, soon to be followed by a flock (school?) of penguins, who would much rather swim than walk.

Penguins need whales, especially minke whales, as friends.

At Cape Royds we watch to see what the adults are feeding their chicks. If it is pink, then the main portion of the food is krill, if it is silver then it is fish. But what kind of fish? That is where the penguin poop tray comes in. At the end of last season we set out a large tray with a fine mesh in an area where penguins have regularly nested. After the breeding season was over and the nesting adults and chicks were gone, the tray was full of penguin guano. Several washings and sortings to eliminate the large stuff later, we sift through the rest looking for otoliths (fish ear bones) which will tell us what kind and how old the fish is. The bones do not get digested so they are passed through. It’s messy work, but important knowledge to gain about Adelie Penguins and their eating habits.

A new otolith tray set out in the field waiting for penguins to make their nests.

Luckily two penguins decided to nest in the tray. Lots of guano for us.

A season’s tray of penguin guano washed and sieved and ready for sorting under the stereoscope.

Now the work begins. It takes hours to look for the tiny bones.

An otolith, less than a millimeter long.

CAPE ROYDS, ROSS ISLAND, ANTARCTICA– Male Adélie Penguins were seen this year at Cape Royds on Oct 21. First a trickle then a flood, by mid November most of the nests had been built, the males had found a mate and the eggs were laid. Cape Royds has a short breeding season; there is no time to waste in this process. Many penguin breeding pairs will return to the same nest site year after year re-bonding with each other and raising their chicks together. But not all penguins find their mates from the previous year. Some did not survive the winter, some may have found a new colony to breed in, others may simply decide not to breed this year and stay out near the ice edge. In these cases new mates must be found.

To attract a mate, males build nests out of small rocks then stand nearby bowing to females as they pass by. Females may just walk by, or step into the nest for a while then move on, or they may stay accepting the male as a partner and his nest as hers. What causes the female to select the nest she wants? There is no way to know for sure, but one thing for sure, not all Adélie Penguin nests are alike. The rock structure, although not warm and soft like other bird nests, provides a barrier to keep the eggs and small chicks from rolling or falling out. It also keeps the eggs above melt water that will flow through some parts of the colony as the weather warms and snow patches turn to small rivulets. Perhaps the females sense the merit of each nest to provide this protection for her chicks, maybe it is random, or maybe there are other factors we do not know about. Either way there is great variation in the nests as you can see by the pictures below.

This year the penguins must walk 50 miles over the frozen sea ice to get to their breeding ground at Cape Royds.

Once they arrive at Cape Royds, the males find a place that suits them and start to build their nests.

This is a well built average nest, the male is waiting for a female to join him.

The female is inspecting the nest.

She enters the nest to see how it works for her.

She decides to stay, the bond is made and this pair will raise some chicks.

Some nest builders use big rocks.

Some prefer small rocks.

This Adélie Penguin built a large nest.

Some penguins build small ones.

Perhaps this female chose this nest because it is well protected by the rocks. Skuas will have trouble attacking here.

This nest is out in the open and very vulnerable. It will be difficult to fend off the Skuas from taking the eggs and chicks.

This nest is very tidy and organized.

This nest is not.

As long as the snow stays frozen this nest will be okay, but when the weather warms up these parents may find their rocks washing away.

This penguin may have trouble finding a mate to join him in this nest.

As you can see, not all Adélie Penguin nests are alike, and just like people they all have their own sense of décor.

Every season, we band a lot of chicks at each colony, and in later seasons spend a huge amount of time looking for them when they come back as pre-breeders (teenagers) and then adults. The numbered metal bands are placed around their left wing and this will identify each bird, as well as the year the bird was born and its natal (birth) colony. Once a banded bird begins to breed (its mate or itself laid an egg), we mark its nest with a plastic tag and nail driven into the permafrost. Then we keep track discovering what happens to each banded bird during the course of its lifetime, at least here at the colonies.

Wing Band. Numbered metal bands are attached to the birds when they are chicks. It identifies which colony the bird was born in and what year.

The banding process takes place at the end of the breeding season just before the chicks do their final molt and head out to sea for the winter: 400 chicks each at Royds and Beaufort, 1000 each at Bird and Crozier, each year. We’ve been doing this since 1996 full-scale, with a few banded in 1994 and 1995. So, in total, more than 33,600 chicks banded to date. This banded “sample” of the colony population will serve as an indicator for the movements and survival rate for each colony.

Some of the things we have learned so far are: Adélie penguins do not always return to the colony of their birth and will move from one colony to another to breed and raise their chicks. This is why we call this complex of colonies a “metapopulation”…no colony is independent of the others. What causes penguins to relocate is mainly due to, as we said, access to the ocean, but also the difficulty of finding food or nest stones where there are a lot of penguins. Thus as colonies grow, and resources become harder to come by, penguins are encouraged to move to smaller colonies….just like people!

Beaufort Island Adélie Penguin colony. These grounded icebergs have been here for several years. They are about 1 km off shore and dwarf everything in the area.

Here is the Ross Sea and the coast of Victoria Land in a NASA image taken last week (below). The red stars show the members of the colony cluster that we are investigating. The blue stars show the other Ross Sea Adélie Penguin colonies.

Penguin colonies in the Ross Sea. Photo courtesy of NASA.

Only the Terra Nova Bay (2 colonies) and Cape Hallet colonies have been thoroughly search for our banded birds, thanks to colleagues in the Italian Antarctic Program (Silvia Olmastroni and friends) and New Zealand Antarctic Program (BJ Karl and friends), who camped at each for several weeks. They found one of our banded birds at each of these three colonies. So, now we know that birds within our metapopulation exchange readily among themselves, but also we know that a few, but not many, intrepid penguins go much farther afield in search of a breeding spot. Tourists with sharp eyes have also noted single banded birds at Franklin Island and at Coulman Island.

At Cape Royds, where we are camped, there are about 2000 nests, so looking for bands takes one person about an hour to complete. However at one of the other colonies in our group, Beaufort Island, there are 60,000 nests and the other day it took four of us four hours to search, and doing so without pause. In fact, we were walking more rapidly in search for bands than is our norm.

In past years there has been open water between Cape Royds and Beaufort so helicopter transport was not possible and band searching could not occur at Beaufort. However, this year the ice is thick so helo transport is possible. From Cape Royds it is a 30 minute helicopter ride to the Island and on this day we stopped to pick up help from Cape Bird: Katie Dugger (co-PI on the project) and Len Doel (volunteer from NZ). Unlike the birds at Cape Royds, the Beaufort Island birds walk less than one mile to open ocean. Why then do the Cape Royds birds make the 50 mile trip when they could nest at Beaufort? We’ve given some hints to the answer, but this is a question for another day.

To establish a breeding colony, Adélie Penguins need ice-free land with a supply of small rocks to build their nest. Beaufort Island has a large beach area with plenty of rocks, but also always easy access to the ocean. So this colony is larger than Royds.

Beaufort Island Colony. A large, ice-free beach with lots of small rocks. The brown areas are where the penguins are. This colony has about 60,000 nests.

Searching for bands requires binoculars and a good eye as you walk along the nesting areas. When we found a banded bird at Beaufort we recorded its number and whether it is on a nest, alone or paired and if the nest has eggs we record the location using a GPS.

Searching for bands. It takes patience and good binoculars to find the banded birds in these large groups.

Color anomalies are rare in penguins, but with a colony this size there is bound to be one, today we found a blond penguin. Its color does not seem to affect its ability to survive.

Blonde Adélie Penguin. A rare color anomaly.

A good days work; about 80 banded or known age birds were identified representing all four colonies of birth, Cape Crozier, Cape Royds, Cape Bird and of course Beaufort Island. The vast majority of banded birds were banded as chicks at Beaufort. We found 5 that were hatched and banded at Cape Royds. In another 7-10 days we will visit Beaufort Island again, because by then all the females will have replaced their mates on the nests. Thus, we’ll probably find another 80 banded birds who were not there a few days ago.

End of day. Searching for bands is hard work in the cold and wind. We are ready to head home.

During the first few weeks, we had to drive out to Cape Royds from McMurdo on snowmobiles every few days. This was because the folks at McMurdo were way backed up in being able to install solar power at our camp. Thus, we couldn’t set up a permanent camp. It’s a 35 km trip from McMurdo, taking about 40 minutes. We had to drive out in order to look for banded penguins, whether they laid eggs, and to change the batteries in the time-lapse cameras. Here we are on one of the trips; for safety two snowmobiles were required…we took along people from McMurdo so that they could get a chance to see Antarctica:

It is a 40 min drive from McMurdo Station to Cape Royds on snow machines. Here we take a break to watch the plume on Mt Erebus, the only active volcano in Antarctica.

The reason the penguins arrived early, is that with a lack of wind during the winter (that’s true, it wasn’t very windy), the large-scale extent of sea ice in this portion of the Southern Ocean was much less than usual. The penguins winter at the pack ice edge, so with the edge much closer to Ross Island, they had a much shorter, maybe 1000 km less, trip to make.

The situation with the ice patterns involves the wind rather than temperatures. The temperatures are cold, regardless. When the winds blow off the continent in the winter the ice is blown farther and farther northward (away from the continent) leaving open water at the coast which allows more ice to be formed, which then gets blown north and the cycle goes on continuously (in most winters-springs). It’s like a conveyor belt. Winters with continuous winds, which is the usual, create pack ice a long way from the land sometimes as far as 2000 km. This last winter the winds were not strong or persistent and not as much ice was blown away from the continent. Thus, the penguins were not very far away when the sun rose and they began their southward journey. Not having as much distance to cover during spring migration, they arrived earlier than usual.

Once the first penguins arrived, the ‘flood’ began. Throughout the following few weeks, birds continued to come ashore, build their nests, find their mates and on Nov 5th we saw the first egg.

The first egg of the 2008-09 Adélie Penguin breeding season at Cape Royds, a bit early this year Nov 5.

Here’s a graph of penguin counts from the PenguinCam, comparing this year with last (the spaces between counts were days when it was too windy or snowy to get a clear image…many more of these windy days in 2007):

Arrival of Adélie Penguins at Cape Royds, based on photos from the Penguin Cam.

The window of successful laying at Cape Royds is short. If the eggs are not laid by about now (24 Nov), it is unlikely that parents can be successful. That’s because the winter comes early! A major factor that will contribute to the success rate of this year’s colony is the distance the birds will have to walk to find open water and food. After the female lays her eggs, she leaves the male in charge of the nest and returns to the sea to forage. This year, because of the lack of wind, a very extensive continuous sheet of ‘fast ice’ was able to form. Normally, wind would have blown new ice away, but the wind didn’t happen, so the ice sat in place and got so thick that whatever the strength of the later wind, it was not strong enough to budge the ice. It was locked fast in place by various points of land (kind of like a jig-saw puzzle). Now it is a long way from Cape Royds to the ocean and food, 70 km. This means two days of just walking, one way. Many females may decide not to return to relieve their mates, or will return a few days too late. The males will not sacrifice themselves for the sake of the egg, the drive to satisfy their growing hunger outweighing the inclination to raise progeny, and if the females do not return they will abandon the eggs. Only time will give us the answer to this one, but it is likely that the ice will remain in place until January, when the icebreaker arrives.

Here is an image taken by a NASA satellite a few days ago. It shows where Royds is located, and where the edge of the fast ice occurs (out by Beaufort Island). So, the penguins at Royds have to add 4 days to a foraging trip, 2 for walking out and 2 for walking back. Added to that are the days needed to catch food and replace fat reserves, i.e. several days. Four days of walking is a long time when you are hungry.

Satellite image of ice conditions in the Ross Sea area.