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.

One result was that the coordination and synchrony of birds with their former maters was thrown out of whack, one bird often arriving much later than the other. It’s not that this sort of condition is new to Adélie penguins, as they are pack ice creatures by choice. In a way, they are ‘used’ to it, sort of (the vagaries of pack ice that is).

When a male penguin arrives and his former mate is late (or doesn’t arrive at all), usually he has some difficulty in finding a new partner. In many cases, he goes the entire spring and summer trying to attract a new one and establish a pair bond. In the case of females, she’ll begin to look for an unattached male after waiting a few days, mateless. The mortality of females is higher, and so there is a surplus of males; easier pickings for females. In the vast majority of pairs, unless they are lost, the laying of eggs and tending of chicks occurs without fanfare: the members of the pair alternate duties equally to raise their chicks.

This is how a pair begins. Lots of bowing to assure the prospective partner that all is good!

Well, as a bit of a related aside, in my interview with Werner Herzog for his film “Encounters at the End of the World” a year or two ago (yes, you should see the movie, came out earlier this year), he tried to get me to talk about deviant or maladaptive behavior in penguins. I really didn’t know why he persisted in asking me these questions (later I found out it had to do with a penguin that wandered into their camp at the base of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, sort of lost) and I deflected his questioning pretty well (?).

He wanted me to talk about gay penguins…heck, why not, I’m sure there are some of those. There’s that lovely story about the penguins in the Bronx Zoo, Tango Makes Three, banned by some immoral (or at least unauthorized) persons who were put off by what they viewed to be deviant behavior. And then he asked questions about other sorts of things, like prostitution. The latter happens when a devious female (not deviant) gains access to a male’s nest, by being totally submissive, and then makes off with one of his rocks. A researcher published a short note about this several years ago, and of course this made the front page of the London Times. Right, sells newspapers!

Here’s a male (on left) who is not convinced this female is sincere about her intentions.

In any case, check out the following histories. The first was last season, when owing to lots of wind, the pack ice was very extensive during the winter and many penguins had a super long trek to make in the spring. Many arrived later than they should. What to do if you’re a female and your mate is nowhere to be found upon arriving at Cape Royds? Well, one female attracted a young, mateless male (Band # 04163) to her nest. They paired, and she laid eggs and then departed, as females are supposed to do. Well, a few days later the female’s mate of the previous year apparently returned, kicked #04163 off the nest, and of course the eggs, in the process. #04163 moped around for a week. The female came back and, of course, associated with her old mate. #04163 moped some more and then left. This past season, he showed up again and attracted a female (the one of the previous season?), who laid eggs, and on they went for quite a while (eventually skuas stole the eggs). Hmmm.

A penguin alone on its nest, but with whose eggs?

This season, without much wind during winter, the large-scale pack ice was not extensive and so wintering areas were closer than usual. Many birds arrived a week earlier than in the past since they had a much shorter distance to travel. In one case, female #02985 arrived much later than her mate, paired with another male, and quickly laid eggs. That mate, having been around a while, then left first but returned in 7 days, just in time. Off she went, but then this male’s former partner arrived and began tending the nest and eggs. Eventually, #02985 came back, very late owing to that 70 km walk, and found herself without a nest. The two formerly paired birds currently are raising two, somewhat adopted young. #02985 is pacing around, dejected.

A similar scenario happened, this time with another female banded penguin, #03809. She paired, apparently with a new partner, laid eggs and off she went. Same sort of thing happened. She eventually came back, again after a longer than usual trip, to find a stranger on the nest. Well, she somehow managed to sit on the eggs for two days, but then other bird came back and displaced her. So, she’s looking on from a spot above the nest in question.

A loving parent, regardless of who was responsible for adding the egg (and ultimately the chick) to the nest.

So, there you have this deviant behavior in penguins. Of course, the really ‘deviant’ behavior (but which I’m sure would not pass as immoral to many people) are the males who come back late to find their ‘homes’ occupied, and then blast the occupants off the property, eggs and/or chicks to boot. You know, protecting one’s home is allowed and is the ‘first’ rule (according to certain national leaders of ours). Then they strut around, collecting rocks to make their castle, friendless and at least for awhile, mateless.

So, you see, penguins are just like people.

The reason we go to Beaufort is that it appears to be the true “penguin pump” in this cluster of colonies in the southern Ross Sea. We want to confirm this. The colony at Cape Crozier produces lots of chicks, like Beaufort, but it has a huge area for expansion, if the penguins are up to that. Mostly they are not, because more and more penguins in one area leads to more competition for food in nearby waters. To avoid that, young Crozier penguins might want to find a territory elsewhere, or not, like at Cape Bird.

The Beaufort colony also regularly produces a lot of chicks, but until recently there was no room for the young prebreeders that result from that to find a spot, except in very poor habitat (see below). That’s why young Crozier birds didn’t want to move there either. The Beaufort breeding area has been hemmed in by vertical cliffs behind, and open ocean the other way. Penguins would be everywhere where they possibly could be, wall-to-wall so to speak. Penguins that didn’t want to tussle for a spot definitely would show up elsewhere like Cape Royds: lots of space there and no competition for food. We know this because we’ve been making the icebreaker trips almost every year since 1996 in order to band a bunch of chicks at Beaufort. In later years, we see these banded birds at Beaufort but in disproportionate numbers we see them at the other colonies, too…until recently.

Beaufort, 2001.

Here’s a shot of Beaufort from the air taken in 2001; west is towards the background. You can see the ‘shelf’ of gravel on which the colony nestles, hemmed in by precipitous cliffs in the back, snow fields to the west, and the ocean. Penguins are everywhere that there is level ground and no ice (there are about 60,000 nests crammed into this area). The west end of the colony is hemmed in by ice fields (see next photo).

Yes, disproportionate numbers of penguins raised at Beaufort have been going elsewhere until a few years ago when global climate change began to kick in around here. Then, with slightly warmer temperatures the snow and ice fields on Beaufort began to rapidly retreat [sound familiar? Hey, I drove up to see Glacier National Park this past summer to see the glaciers before they are gone….maybe by 2015 they say.] This warming caused the ice to retreat at Beaufort also, thus exposing lots of terrain with lots of small pebbles, ideal for nests.

A new breeding area at Beaufort.

Here is a picture of penguins setting up territories at the west periphery of the colony that until recently, 2001 (see aerial Beaufort photo) was covered (probably for the last 20,000 years) by snow and ice. These penguins were not here in 2001. So, you see, that bad-ee, Global Climate Change, can be “good” sometimes!

Well, there are so many penguins trying to find a nest at Beaufort, and so little space and not enough rocks, that, actually, Global Climate Change is not happening fast enough!! As a result, many penguins are nesting in suboptimal habitat and more than likely they will lose their nests and its eggs. This will force them to be more prudent next season. Either they will set up nests at the west end of Beaufort (see photo above)…the most likely….or many will seek out places like Cape Royds, where lots of stones are to be had along with lots of space (and usually open water; see next blog dispatch).

With stones in short supply, some penguins turn to nesting in guano (penguin poop).

These penguins are nesting in scoops in the guano with almost no stones. All of the stones have been used up by other penguins! More than likely their eggs will roll out of the nest and, in fact, on our next visit following this one, we found eggs EVERYWHERE.

With an insufficient number of rocks holding a nest together, penguins’ eggs roll out and are lost.

There are well over 30 whole eggs in this picture that have rolled out of nests. There simply were not enough rocks for the penguins to build the protective “basket” to hold them.

Still lots of nests had eggs but lots had rolled away– so many that the skuas had too many to eat! The other thing that happens when a penguin has a scoop but no stones, is that it fills up with water. That’s bad for eggs and chicks.

Penguins with drowned nests.

Here are penguins who built nests, and laid eggs, in a depression that initially was dry but now is filled with melt water. There was no room for them on high ground. Yes, there are eggs underneath these birds!! This is a demonstration of how staunch penguins are, in spite of adversity. They won’t give up until the conditions become impossible. These are impossible conditions, and yes, these penguins gave up!

Ill-fated nests.

Here are a bunch of penguins that have built their nests on a nice sandy beach (above). How idyllic! It’s the kind of place that people would hang out; all we need are some palm trees. However, when all that ice in the background eventually melts later in the summer, then the sea is going to come pouring in, waves crashing, to wash the penguins’ feet, but also their eggs and chicks, too. These penguins, too, next season will be looking elsewhere for making a nest!

So you see, and I know you’ve been told this before, Nature works in strange ways. It takes some adversity to convince penguins, and people, to alter their behavior…that is, to stay in higher or safer ground!!!! This is going to be the same for people beginning very soon, as global climate change REALLY gets going. I hear that insurance companies no longer are insuring houses on the US Gulf Coast, owing to increasing numbers of hurricanes and rising sea level. See, if the insurance companies can’t afford this, neither can the rest of us. Where are all those Floridians going to be living? In Georgia, I guess. Penguin Insurance Companies, to stay in business, would not insure these penguins’ homes shown above. (Penguins don’t get government bailouts for bad decisions.)

View of Cape Royds.

As a backdrop to our camp and the colony is Mt Erebus, a true living, breathing, belching, active volcano whose plume is only visible when the atmospheric conditions are just right.

View of Mt Erebus form Cape Royds.

Days will pass and we will not see another human being nor hear any sound other than our own and the birds. No, I do not get lonely, and I look forward all year to this two month time frame when I am given the gift of living at the edge of world with these remarkable creatures who adapted themselves to this harsh environment so they could have the place to themselves.

It is all about the science, and my job is connecting it to classrooms across the US and around the world, sharing the experience of Antarctica and the lives of these birds with children and others who may only see penguins in zoos. Many people do not have a sense of Antarctica and do not understand the role this large continent plays in our ocean and climate systems. Most will never set foot on this, the most remote place on Earth.

Many people do not realize how pristine and unspoiled the entire continent is. It is the only continent that has never been continuously populated by people, and except for the northern tip of the Antarctica peninsula, there are no land plants or animals above the micro level. The southern ocean that surrounds Antarctica is the last unspoiled ocean on the planet. If we are to maintain the unspoiled, untouched nature of this extraordinary place, people must have a connection to it and care about it. Our project reaches out to children and adults in an effort to create that connection and sense of stewardship.

Teachers in classrooms all across the country use our website to engage students about Antarctica. We have developed classroom activities, an educational DVD, webisodes, background information for teachers, and many activities designed to engage children in penguins, Antarctica and global climate change. One of our projects is about postcards. Many children have never received a piece of mail let alone a postcard from a foreign country, let alone a postcard from Antarctica. We have received and sent back over 10000 handmade penguin postcards from children around the world. Here are some examples.

Penguin postcards made by children.

Every year we select 6 breeding pairs (one from each pair is a banded bird) to follow along on a daily basis allowing children in classrooms a chance to be field biologists. They keep a field journal, recording the dates the eggs are laid, when the chicks hatch, how long the female or male is on the nest, how long the foraging trips are and other factors effecting the chicks growth. We hope some of these young biologists will make education and career choices that will propel them into the science and engineering fields. Here is an example of these nests from the beginning of the season to the end of the season.

Penguins on nests and chicks.

Other students connect with us by making a flag to fly at the research station.

This flag from students in Maine serves as a wind speed and direction indicator for our penguin cam.

A flag designed by a student flew on our research hut last year.

Some send us questions about penguins, Antarctica and the Polar regions, we have answered thousands.

We have also produced an educational DVD about how penguins are coping with global climate change. You can order a copy from our website penguinscience.com.

Yes it is about the science, and my job is to share that science with the world.
To see the webisodes visit http://www.penguinscience.com/media/video/webisodes.php.
To learn more about the postcard project, design a flag or other classroom activities visit http://www.penguinscience.com/classroom_home.php.

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.

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.