Something you don't get to do every day is enter a restricted zone in Antarctica: a place of special significance and fragility that one requires a scientific permit to visit. But: if an Australian biologist has such a permit, and is taking a visiting Chinese ecologist to an Adelie penguin rookery on an island near Davis, and they need a helper, then you have to grit your teeth and help out.
We went to Magnetic Island by zodiac. Clare and Romero headed out in a second boat to take some core samples near O'Gorman Rocks. The sky was blue and penguins porpoised through the water as we drove past Anchorage. Then: something launched out of the water in front of us and there was a penguin standing on the front of our boat like a figurehead. He stood there for a long time, watching us curiously.
Rachael, Zipan and I were dropped off at Magnetic Island and the others continued on. The island was a caked-up mound of penguin shit, regurgitated krill and dead birds - thousands of years of penguin history layered up in a foul, feathery strata a half-metre thick. The din of squawking birds was so loud that it was hard to hear the radio when we did our hourly scheds with comms. The first thing we saw as we stepped onto the rocks were fluffy brown baby penguins looking cute in the sun. The second thing we saw was one of the cute baby penguins doing a lime-green projectile poo onto a neighbouring rock. Rachael said she's actually seen a journal paper from an Australian researcher who got a government grant to come to Antarctica to study the poo ballistics of baby Adelies. Ah, the noble pursuit of science.
Rachael and Zipan on Magnetic Island
After we'd stripped off our immersion suits and left them on the rocks, we walked up to the top of the island and Zipan took a few soil samples. The view was a panorama showing Davis in the distance in one direction, with the Vestfolds behind it and the plateau rising in the distance; in the other direction we could look over the flats of the island and see the thousands and thousands of breeding penguins and chicks dotted all over the ground. Where they clustered, the ground was stained pink from regurgitated krill; in between the clusters ran black streams of penguin shit, draining into the ocean. The air smelled thick and was full of feathery dust. Every now and then an adult penguin would race madly into a bare patch of ground, pursued comically by two or three juveniles desperate for a feed.
After being attacked by half a dozen nesting skuas and narrowly avoiding skua chicks and an abandoned penguin egg, we cautiously made our way down the steep slope to the rookery proper. The ground was completely coated with dead penguin carcasses in various stages of rotting. We tried to rock-hop and leave no footprints; we moved cautiously, picking paths clear of nesting sites, which were full of loose stones which adults would occasionally raid from neighbouring nests. We stepped over black rivers of slime. Juveniles waved their wings at us and ran between us, pursuing their parents. As Zipan took a thirty-centimeter core sample - which he said would give him information about the last thousand years of penguin history - an adult regurgitated krill into the mouth of its chick right beside his kitbag. Zipan said that even here in Antarctica, these penguins contained trace amounts of the poisonous pesticide DDT, carried over the ocean by winds.
Thousands of years of penguin carcasses coat the island.
River of Poo
A penguin feeds its chick as Zipan and Rachael work.
After we'd been there a few hours the zodiacs came back and picked us up. We struggled back into our immersion suits on the rocks and watched penguins return from diving expeditions, rocketing out of the water onto the land. We returned to Davis, cleaned the boats, and ended the JOLLY OF THE CENTURY.
