The Last Cold Place: a Field Season Studying Penguins in Antarctica by Naira de Gracia

Author:Naira de Gracia [Gracia, Naira de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

To my immense relief, after three days of hibernation the man behind the curtain gradually came to life again. Usually, Matt is a solid, grounded presence, composed, thoughtful, inward. In our friendship, he is the plant and I am the bee that buzzes on waves of happy creative chaos, flying in erratic loops around him. In my attempts to hold down the fort and take care of him, this dynamic was exacerbated to an almost comical extreme. Matt was barely moving and I hadn’t stopped. The next day he could hike (albeit slowly), so we jumped immediately to conducting diet samples. We’d delayed the diet-sample collection due to his absence and could not wait any longer. We had only conducted one round of diet samples before he got sick, and I had been preparing to do it with the crew, leading it on my own. I bustled around him, prepping everything, bringing the penguins, restraining them, pumping them, and then carrying them back to the colonies.

January was our busiest month. When the chicks hatched, the adults came and went from the colonies to forage so often that we had only a brief window to gather information on these trips, knowing they’d soon return to the nest. In January we did two rounds of geotracker deployments and time-depth recorder deployments, twenty-one-day chick weighs, diet-sample collection, and daily skua-nest checks to catch hatch dates (as opposed to every fourth day, as during the rest of the season). No time could be wasted.

Diet sampling was the most intense and arguably excruciating part of the season for seabird technicians. It took a lot of time, focus, and preparation and was highly technical and emotionally draining. Sampling penguin diets was the only way of literally seeing what the birds were hunting in the ocean near their breeding colonies, of measuring the size of the krill they were catching and accounting directly for their diet.

It was also the most invasive process we had to do with penguins, and we required the help of Sam and Whitney, who joined us in the colonies to help catch penguins. Penguins returning from the ocean carried krill in their stomachs to regurgitate to their chicks. We’d wait for a returning penguin to greet its mate, write down the number of chicks in its nest and the sex of the bird, then fling a net over its body, gather it up, and take it to the deck of the skua shack to be “pumped,” i.e., to collect a diet sample from it.

A bladder with warm water, a plastic hose, a bucket, and sieves were already prepared on the deck. I held the penguin between my legs while Matt opened its mouth and slid the hose down its esophagus. Then he raised the bladder and the water slid down the hose into the bird’s stomach. He held the bladder up until we heard a little gurgle. I grabbed hold of the penguin’s feet and stood up, holding it upside down and supporting its back against my leg while Matt opened its bill and massaged its neck.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.