Frozen in Place: The Mystery of the Mummified Seals

Weddell seal near Cape Bernacchi
Seals? Yes. Polar bears? No: A young Weddell seal raises its head to check us out before continuing its nap on the sea ice near Cape Bernacchi. It probably got onto the ice via a hole several yards away that was cut earlier in the season by Sam Bowser’s dive team.

Let’s clear up one thing that I get asked a lot: there are no polar bears in Antarctica. That’s the Arctic. The only mammals are marine mammals, found along the coasts: seals — which I saw on a number of occasions — and whales —which I did not see at all. The only birds I saw were skuas, which are feisty brown birds related to gulls, and Adélie penguins. Uphill from the sea ice pressure ridges in New Harbor beneath the Double Curtain Glacier was a highly unusual sight — several square yards of gray and tan moss — the only plant life I saw growing in soil the entire seven weeks I was in Antarctica. Further inland, walking the gravel hills and ice-covered lakes of the Dry Valleys, you and your companions are the only living things in sight — nothing green, feathered, scaly or furry. The exception was a lone skua occasionally spotted in the vicinity of the Lake Hoare field camp, nicknamed Taylor by the field camp residents. The major life forms of the Dry Valleys are microscopic organisms in the lakes, streams and soil that scientists sample and study as part of the long-term ecological research study, but of course, they’re not visible without a microscope.

Moss in the Dry Valleys
A rare sign of life: This patch of moss on a hill between the Double Curtain Glacier and a pressure ridge was the only plant I saw growing in the Dry Valleys.

Against that backdrop, it was startling to periodically come across the bodies of mummified seals in the Dry Valleys, several miles from the ocean. Seals are built for swimming. Underwater footage shows even 10-foot-long, 1,200-pound Weddell seals gracefully gliding along. They spend most of their time in the water, occasionally poking their heads out to take a few breaths. Periodically, they laboriously haul themselves onto the ice to rest, like the young Weddell seal in the photo at the top of this post. The ellipsoidal body shape, wing-like flippers and tail that serve them underwater are definitely not made for walking. Once you’ve seen a seal galumphing with great difficulty across the ice like a giant slug, it’s even more remarkable to imagine how they could travel for miles on their bellies, dragging their rotund bodies over ragged lake ice and gravel hills. An oft-quoted statistic is that mummified seals have been documented as far inland as 41 miles. If that’s the case, this one at Lake Bonney must be one of them, since that’s about how far the lake is from McMurdo Sound:

Mummified seal, Lake Bonney
This mummified seal atop Lake Bonney traveled about as far as any have managed — around 41 miles from the sea.
Mummified seal, Lake Bonney
A closer look at the Lake Bonney seal, lying on its back atop ablated lake ice.

The dry, freezing climate and lack of bacteria and invertebrates that break down carcasses in warmer regions leave the seals in varying states of preservation that make it impossible to tell how long they’ve been lying there by their appearance just by sight. Some are mostly skeletal, some still have a substantial amount of leathery skin attached, but you can’t tell if they’re a few years old or several hundred without doing a laboratory analysis of carbon and nitrogen isotopes.

A research team led by Paul Koch and Brenda Hall in the 2012-13 and 2013-14 seasons has done just that. They saw these seals not as a weird curiosity, but as a way to investigate the history of seal populations over the past 1,500 years, and how they adapted to changing amounts of ice in McMurdo Sound in terms of their diet, which is also revealed by the chemical analysis. Up until about 500 years ago, McMurdo Sound had far less ice than it did afterwards, when ice shelves formed. Knowing how the seals responded and how their diet changed would help predict how warming oceans might affect them in the future. To that end, the scientists a undertook a comprehensive inventory of Dry Valleys mummified seals and took over 400 samples to be analyzed (read more about the study in the Antarctic Sun and this press release). “Studies of fossils let us see how species do or don’t adapt to environmental shifts. Here, we are using that approach to explore the adaptability and vulnerability of different Antarctic seal species to less icy conditions in the near future,” said Koch.

If you’ve read every single one of my Antarctica blog posts, you’ve encountered a few of the following scenes before, but I thought it would be interesting to bring them all together in one place, along with some information about what is known about them.

Ferrar Glacier, seal skeleton and pressure ridge
This seal near the Double Curtain Glacier didn’t get very far uphill before succumbing. The Ferrar Glacier is in the distance.
Mummified seal skeleton
Close-up of the seal skeleton. The flipper anatomy is very clear on the right.

The presence of mummified seals has posed a scientific mystery since the first explorers of the region in the early 1900s ran across them. They’re generally small, and I have run across only one account of researchers encountering a live seal in the Dry Valleys. The current assumption is that these are young seals that get lost during whiteout conditions in the harsh Antarctic winter, when the seals usually stay near cracks in the sea ice. Without visual cues, they get turned around and crawl along in a futile search for the sea until they expire. As of October 2015, Koch’s team published that it had reported identified mummies of over 300 crabeater seals, 100 Weddell seals and around 20 leopard seals, a proportional breakdown roughly corresponding to their current numbers in the sound. That sounds like a significant number of wayward seals, but the mummies can be as much as 1,500 years old. Koch told the Antarctic Sun that it may be that only one or two lose their way each year.

The leopard seal shown below, on the Lake Fryxell side of the Canada Glacier, is a rare sight on a few counts. Leopard seals make up less than 5% of the mummified seals. This one is pretty much intact, including fur, which is unusual. And unlike the vast majority of the mummies, we know for sure that this one is a recent arrival, because this area is frequently traversed by Dry Valleys researchers and they took note of its appearance a couple of years ago.

Leopard seal near Lake Fryxell
A mummified leopard seal is a rare sight. This one made it past Lake Fryxell, which is in the background.
Mummified leopard seal
A closer look at the leopard seal.
Mummified seal near the Canada Glacier
This seal skeleton was in the general vicinity of the leopard seal, on the Fryxell side of the Canada Glacier. Odds are it’s a crabeater seal, which are far more commonly found than leopard seals. (The remaining teeth look right for it to be a crabeater, too.) The top of the seal has been sandblasted off over the years by winds ripping through the valley, but you can see that the part facing the ground is probably in one piece.
Mummified seal near Canada Glacier
The same seal as above, with the Canada Glacier behind it to the right.

Mummified seals are not only found in the Dry Valleys. There’s one on the black sand beach at Cape Royds. It’s notably well preserved, but it’s right by the sea ice so there is no mystery as to how it ended up there:

Mummified seal, Cape Royds
On the black sand beach at Cape Royds, the tan object in the center of the photo is the mummified seal shown below. (Photo is slightly blurry because it is a detail of a broader vista.)
Mummified seal, Cape Royds
Mummified seal on the black sand beach at Cape Royds.

I photographed all the mummified seals I encountered, with the exception of one that had remarkably made it the length of Lake Hoare and part way up a hill near the Suess Glacier. It was dismembered into two halves, lying in the dirt side by side, which for some reason struck me as more grotesque and disturbing than a dead seal in one piece. I just didn’t want to look at that again! But probably the strangest one I saw was also near the Suess Glacier: rather than lying on its back or its side, it’s perched on its belly, tail curving upwards and head lifted as if flash-frozen in mid motion.

Mummified seal, Lake Hoare
This mummified seal at the west end of Lake Hoare is unusual for coming to rest in a pose that gives it a strangely animated look. Rae, the Lake Hoare camp manager, suggested that it was underwater for a long time, and revealed by a retreating shoreline. This view faces the direction the seal came from. It would have to have crawled around the Commonwealth Glacier, down the length of Lake Fryxwell, around the Canada Glacier and down the length of Lake Hoare to reach this point!
Seal near Suess Glacier
Close up of the seal near the Suess Glacier, looking west toward the glacier, which is in the upper left corner.

The scientists who have studied these seals are interested in them as a fossil record and a way of understanding the history of ocean ecology. What drives the seals to travel for miles over land and how they survive the journeys is ultimately beside the point in terms of their research. The lack of information about that aspect is a reminder, though, of how little we still know about what Antarctic animals do during the long, dark winters — that includes seals and penguins. At one of the science lectures, I asked Jennifer Burns, who has been studying Weddell seals for over 20 years, if she had seen any changes in behavior related to climate change. She responded that she hesitates to make comparisons because monitoring and tracking hardware is so much better quality now than 20 years ago. Devices are smaller and less intrusive to attach to the animal — in the past they were bulky and generally didn’t stay on long. In years to come, perhaps more seals will be tracked and shed some light on the mystery of the lost seals.

 

Scott’s Hut at Cape Evans: An Antarctic Time Capsule

Table inside Cape Evans
Inside the hut, a taxidermy Emperor penguin lies beside a  copy of “The Illustrated London News” on a work table.

One day in late November, five of us took a day trip over the sea ice by snowmobile to visit Scott’s Hut at Cape Evans. To paraphrase the words of a bronze plaque outside the building, the hut is protected by international treaty and maintained as an historic monument to the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-1913 led by Robert F. Scott, who built it in January 1911 as the expedition headquarters. (Read a brief history of the expedition.) Like Shackleton’s Hut at Cape Royds and Discovery Hut at McMurdo, it is administered by an historic trust headquartered in New Zealand. To obtain a key and enter, at least one member of your party has to have received authorized training. I was amazed at how much stuff had been left inside, and because of the cold dry climate, it’s in a remarkable state of preservation. It’s like stepping across the threshold into a time capsule from 100 years ago.

Part of the briefing before going to the hut was to warn us to not touch any of the artifacts and to walk carefully. Outside the hut, not even shards of broken glass, splinters of wood or leftover bones from dinner were to be touched. Everything was left as is. Behind the hut, the anchor from Scott’s Terra Nova ship is half buried in the volcanic soil:

Cape Evans hut
The half-buried anchor (the dark right-angled shape near the center of the gravel area) and an assortment of crates and other detritus have been left undisturbed for over 100 years.

Here are a few more exterior photos to give a sense of the location:

View of Cape Evans
Like Cape Royds, the coast of Cape Evans is covered with volcanic gravel from Mt. Erebus. This view looks north from the top of Wind Vane Hill, overlooking the hut, where there is a memorial cross to three explorers who perished in 1916 (see next photo). Beyond the hut, on the sea ice, is a seal study hut. Along the ice edge on the right is the Barnes Glacier. To the left, on the sea ice, that dark spot is our snowmobiles.
Memorial cross above Cape Evans
The memorial cross above Cape Evans was erected by the Ross Sea Party, led by Captain Aeneas Mackintosh, of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917, in memory of three members of the party who died in the vicinity in 1916.

The trip was of particular interest to Shaun O’Boyle, a photographer who was the only other Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grantee whose residency overlapped with mine. Shaun has a background in architecture as well as photography and his project, “Portraits of Place in Antarctica,” focused on documenting the buildings and manmade structures in the area around McMurdo from the past 110 years. Three Lockheed Martin staffers also came with us, McMurdo veterans Ralph Maestas, a videographer, and his colleague Joolee Aurand, who both also ran the base TV station, and Mike Lucibella, who was there for his first season as editor and reporter for The Antarctic Sun, the official news outlet for the U.S. Antarctic program.

I’d taken snowmobile training 10 days earlier, the day after I arrived at McMurdo, but this was the first time I’d driven one since then. I was confident about being able to keep my balance on it, even on inclines, but when I had to put the thing in reverse, it tended to abruptly lurch backward. However, I figured after two 90-minute trips, I’d pretty much have it down. My biggest problem turned out to be, as someone who wears glasses, how to keep them from fogging up while keeping my face from freezing! People are always asking me how cold it was in Antarctica. Well, that day it was in the mid teens, and going 25 miles an hour on a snowmobile, the wind on your face felt even colder. I started out covering my face with the program-issue balaclava:

Helen and Mike on snowmobiles
Mike and I prepare to head toward Cape Evans. You’ll have to take my word for it, but I am the one sporting the Antarctic ninja look on the right. Photo: Elaine Hood

Cape Evans is the largest of the historic huts. There is one large section where the men slept in bunk beds, cooked, kept their medical supplies, had a darkroom for photography, and work tables for their telegraph and laboratory equipment. Seeing the crepuscular light shining in through dusty windows onto the dark wooden walls, old pitchers and crockery was like walking into a painting by Vermeer or Chardin. What surprised me was how much stuff the explorers left behind. Did they think that maybe other explorers would make use of them in the future, or was it just too much trouble to pack it up and take it home to England? Whatever their reasons, they left not just equipment and leftover tins and crates of food, but personal items: wool socks, fur boots, blankets, bedrolls, and arrangements of photos glued to boards for decoration. Not to mention a copy of the London Illustrated News and a large, stuffed Emperor penguin.

Cape Evans hut interior
Cape Evans still life: entering the main room, a shaft of light illuminates a wall of wooden crates and a porcelain pitcher.
Pictures of dogs
The men decorated the walls with arrangements of photos attached to boards. Somebody was a dog lover.
Cape Evans kitchen
The kitchen is still stocked with provisions, dishes and cookware.
Cape Evans boots and portrait
Another photo on the wall, beside a pair of sealskin boots. Cubbyholes had been fashioned by nailing empty wooden crates to the wall.
Bunk beds, Cape Evans hut
Bunk beds with pillows, blankets and personal items that were left behind.
Lab table, Cape Evans
The laboratory table was squeezed in between two bunks (it faced the bunks shown in the previous photo). In addition to reaching the South Pole, an important goal of the expedition was to collect scientific data.
Telegraph equipment, Cape Evans Terra Nova Hut
What remains of the Cape Evans communications center. I suspect they did take home the good stuff.
Medicine bottles, Cape Evans hut.
A small partitioned area in the back had long shelves along two walls lined with boxes of bandages and bottles of chemicals and medicines, includes bygone remedies such as camphor flowers (center) and the small green box on the right, labeled “‘HEMISINE’ (Trade Mark) A permanent Solution of the crystalline active principle of the super-renal gland.” It bears an advisory to store in a “cool dark place” — can’t get much cooler and darker than here! To the left of the Hemisine is a metal container of pyrogallic acid. It was either being used as a photographic developer or, despite what we now know about its toxicity, a remedy for skin conditions.
Shaun O'Boyle photographing at Cape Evans
Shaun was in his element here. He’s interested in history and loves photographing in old buildings.
Seal blubber, Cape Evans hut
That stack that looks like a burned mattress drenched in tar is actually a 100-year-old pile of seal blubber.

Exiting the living area, an enclosed corridor led to the stables and contained a bed-sized pile of seal blubber, blackened with age. Around the corner were stalls with even more boxes of supplies, tools, equipment, as well as decidedly more curious leftovers such as a box of penguin eggs, a hand-carved wooden wheelbarrow, a bicycle (a bicycle? in Antarctica?), and accessories for what turned out to be an ill-advised idea to use ponies for transportation. A couple of snowshoes for horses hang on one wall. We noticed some names stenciled on the same wall, and were puzzled at first, until realizing that those were probably the names of the horses.

Penguin eggs and pickaxes.
The stables were used for storage. Here’s a box of penguin eggs collected for scientific study and some extra pickaxes, minus handles.
Begum, Cape Evans stable
Begum, whose name is stenciled on the stable wall, must have been one of the ponies.
Horse snowshoes, Cape Evans
You didn’t know they made snowshoes for horses, did you?
Bicycle at Cape Evans
They even brought a bicycle to Antarctica. I doubt it got much use once they arrived. Not sure where they were expecting to ride a bike with skinny tires.
Wheelbarrow, Cape Evans hut
Someone made a mini-wheelbarrow from a wood crate and a hand-carved wheel.

You might be wondering — as we did — how much of this was authentically left as is and how much of it was rearranged and staged by the New Zealand historic trust staff who maintain the huts. A few weeks later, I was sitting in the field camp hut at Cape Royds one evening with penguin researchers Katie and Jean, when one of them heard some voices in the distance. “Here come the Kiwis,” she said. Al Fastier, the program manager for the historic sites; conservator Lizzie Meek; Martin Wenzel, a restoration carpenter; and two young women who were assisting them had been working down the hill at Shackleton’s hut for the past several days. They were about to leave and came in to say goodbye, a bottle of Scotch in hand. We managed to make room for all eight of us and their parkas in the small room (I think it was no larger than 12 x 15 feet, including the camp stove, plywood desks along one wall, propane heater, wash-up station and boxes of food). I had not been issued a permit to visit Shackleton’s hut before going to Cape Royds, so I had not gone in. I asked them about something I’d heard from somebody else, that Shackleton’s hut was less staged and in a more natural state than Scott’s at Cape Evans. This made the Kiwis smile. Actually, they said, it was the other way around. Katie noted that when she first started to coming to Cape Royds in the early 2000s, the items inside were in more disarray, and in a way she preferred it that way; you felt more of the human presence. The Kiwis acknowledged that over time items had been removed for conservation, then put back, and that there was a balancing act between protecting them and making it possible for visitors to walk around, while not going overboard with arranging.

Shackleton's Hut, Cape Royds
Shackleton’s Hut at Cape Royds is on a hill overlooking Pony Lake, the sea ice, and the Adélie penguin colony (the bluff with tan patches is where the penguins nest).

Conversation turned to a hot topic this season: the so-called “Shackleton’s axe” — authentic or hoax? The helicopter pilots had recently noticed a pickaxe sticking out of the top of a tall, pointy-topped mound of volcanic gravel, the metal part wedged into the gravel and the handle pointing up at a jaunty angle. On the flight to Cape Royds, our pilot had pointed it out to Evan and me and said it was two miles by air from the field camp. That doesn’t sound like much, but over rugged, hilly terrain, it would be a considerable hike. The sudden appearance of the axe poking out of the pile, even in midst of that forbidding and remote area, struck many people as a possible prank. Lizzie said she’d looked at high-resolution photographs of it and that the markings on the axe were consistent with the period so it plausibly belonged to Shackleton’s party. Al said that it was plausible that the mounds were used as landmarks for supply caches for Shackleton’s epic trans-Antarctic journey and that an axe could have been stuck in the top to help the expedition team find it. That makes sense, though as Jean pointed out after they’d left, why it seemed to suddenly appear, and at a picture-perfect angle, remains an open question!

Shaun’s blog has some good photos of the pickaxe, and indeed, of the Cape Evans hut and the other two huts. They’re worth checking out to see a different approach to the same subject matter than mine. For one thing, he processed his photos mostly in black and white, for another, since this project was specifically about architecture he spent a lot more time in the huts than I did, returning for repeat visits. In general I’ve found it interesting to compare our photos of the same places, seeing which places where we chose similar shots and where our different interests and personalities emerge.

Note: Cape Evans is where I took a photograph of an unusual cloud formation over Mt. Erebus that the Cloud Appreciation Society, a large online database of cloud images and information, chose as its January 2016 Cloud of the Month (see below and earlier post).

Cap and banner cloud over Mt. Erebus
Cap and banner cloud atop Mt. Erebus from Cape Evans, AKA the Cloud Appreciation Society January 2016 Cloud of the Month.

 

Ice Designs – A Closer Look at Antarctic Lake Ice at Cape Royds

Ice formation, Cape Royds
This bumpy ice at the edge of one of the inland lakes at Cape Royds looked like flash-frozen oblong bubbles.

For my Antarctic Artists and Writers Program project, I expected to be photographing glaciers and large ice formations, but once I got to Cape Royds and the Dry Valleys, I also discovered some small scale — even tiny — ones that fascinated me in their variety and the unexpected shapes or colors. It seems that the extreme cold of Antarctica generates some peculiar ice formations in the freshwater lakes fed by glaciers.

Frozen waves, lake ice, Cape Royds
Looks like waves lapping on the lake shore, but they’re completely frozen.
One of the large lakes at Cape Royds. Mt. Erebus is in the distance. The first couple of days I was there, the lake was frozen and you could walk right onto it from the shore and cross to the middle. That's when I took these photos. But a couple of days later, the edges had thawed and there was no way to get to the ice without wading across a few feet of water.
One of the large lakes at Cape Royds. Mt. Erebus is in the distance. The first couple of days I was there, the lake was frozen and you could walk right onto it from the shore and cross to the middle. That’s when I took these photos. But a couple of days later, the edges had thawed and there was no way to get to the ice without wading across a few feet of water.

Some of these lakes melt around the edges this time of year (December-January), but never thaw completely. I don’t know if the kind of ice formations you’ll see in the photos that follow are found elsewhere in other places that are cold much of the year, for example, the Arctic. Nobody I’ve asked so far could tell me, but then again, most people who are working in those places as mountaineer guides or researchers aren’t attending to that ice, except as a practical matter to check out if it’s safe to walk on it. So if anyone reading this has more information about what physical processes are causing these shapes, feel free to comment!

Ice at Cape Royds
A close-up of a jagged ice pattern found walking along the black sand beach at Cape Royds. It’s pretty much all straight lines.

It also could be at Cape Royds that because of its proximity to the sea, there are salts in the water that are contributing to some of these effects. This cracking pattern at the left was not photographed at the lake, but at the edge of a black sand beach where there was a pressure ridge and sea ice. But snow was melting from a ridge above the beach so it’s hard to say if it’s frozen freshwater or frozen sea water or a combination.

 

Ice formation, Cape Royds
Ice structure in the middle of a lake at Cape Royds. The ice around it was thick and solid enough to walk on.

 

 

Some of the unusual patterns I found were at the center of one of the inland lakes at Royds, where gravel from the surrounding hills had blown onto the ice, piled up there, and there was a frozen flat-topped ice structure sitting on top of it. There were a lot of these isolated flat-topped ice structures at Lake Hoare in the Dry Valleys, too. The ice designs I found at Lake Hoare will be the subject of a later blog post. The explanation I got at Hoare was that while the ice forms from the bottom (and in the Dry Valleys the lake ice is a few meters thick), the frozen surface of the lake ice ablates — that is, vaporizes into the air — but sometimes leaves areas that haven’t ablated still sticking up above the frozen lake surface. The next few photos were taken near one of those structures, shown in the above photo. It was probably about three feet high, several feet wide and extended for several feet in the middle of the lake. You can see in the photo there was a lot of sediment around it.

Ice formation, lake at Cape Royds
This design, photographed near the formation shown above, has rounded shapes, within which are a combination of straight lines and curves. And it has distinct layers at different depths, presumably from freezing and melting and refreezing at different times.

In the lakes at Cape Royds you’ll also find what looks like torn up bits of cream, tan and orange paper scattered on top of and within the ice. Those are algal mats. Around that tabletop shaped formation at the center of the lake were these “collages”:

Lake ice, algal mat, Cape Royds
An algal mat “collage” in the lake ice.
Algal mat, lake ice, Cape Royds
This one looks like someone splattered turquoise paint on it. You can see where gravel has blown onto the ice and piled up. The gravel melts holes in the ice, too.
Lake ice, Cape Royds
This microworld of a thick layer of ice on top of sediment has some scattered fragments of algal mat, frozen bubbles of varying size and holes. It was taken nearby the two photos above.

I’ve saved the strangest formation for last. This one was by the shore. The ice was a deep shade of turquoise, and inside were vertical ribbons caused by…what? They were definitely three-dimensional as you moved around them. I’m trying to find out what causes them. They looked to be about 3/4 of an inch wide. Here’s an overall photo and a detail:

Lake ice formations, Cape Royds
Ribbons in the ice: anyone know what causes these? I also saw similar patterns in Lake Hoare but the ribbons were not nearly as wide, nor were they colorful, just plain white.
Ice formation, detail, Cape Royds
Detail of the ice ribbons.

In a future post I’ll show some of the small surface ice formations from Lake Hoare, which were different than these. I’ve encountered much more variety of ice in Antarctica than I had expected, a happy discovery.

 

 

Penguin Watching

Penguin and chick
Newborn penguin chick — one of the first if not the first to hatch this season — greets its parent.

 

I can’t believe my luck. I mean, really. December 13th was my last full day at Cape Royds. It was overcast and the coldest day since I’d been at Royds and I had to keep stopping to warm up my hands. Not to sound melodramatic or anything, but I also had a cold and wasn’t feeling 100 percent. But I went out for a couple of afternoon walks with my camera and tripod anyway — one in the direction of the volcanic landscape, then after a pit stop at the field camp tent to warm up, one to the penguin colony. I have been told by the research team here that this is the time of year they typically see the first chicks. Nobody saw them yesterday, but Katie thought she heard a faint peeping and that there might have been some pecking their way out of their shells. Since I knew I would be getting picked up late morning the next day, I knew this would be my last chance to see chicks and I was on the alert for sounds. It started getting windy and I thought I heard something a couple of times but when I went over to investigate didn’t see anything. I wasn’t sure if it was my camera bag strap squeaking in the wind, which it does sometimes. After watching a colony that sounded like the direction it was coming from, I did catch a glimpse of an egg with a hole in it when a penguin stood up briefly and then settled back on top of it. But after waiting several minutes in the cold, I decided it wasn’t happening, my fingers were frozen and started walking in the direction of the path to the campsite. As I passed the neighboring subcolony, I heard an unmistakable peeping sound, looked to my left and saw this scene. It only lasted about 2 minutes — I took a few stills, turned on the video, and watched the penguin feed the chick and settle back down on it. You can see the video on YouTube.

Penguin subcolony at Cape Royds
The subcolonies are distributed throughout the colony. Some have numerous nesting pairs, like this one, others only have a few. I saw one with just four nests.

Mostly what I saw while I was here were behaviors related to nesting. All the penguins who will breed this year have paired up, created little stone nests in their subcolony groups, and laid the eggs. The male does most of the nest-building, but once the female lays the eggs, they trade places sitting on the eggs. One goes down to the water to forage for food while the other sits on the eggs. When the foraging penguin returns, they great each other with a little dance where they swoop their necks up and down in unison and call out loudly. Then they switch places and the other parent goes off to feed.

I was hanging out on the bluff overlooking the water watching the penguins form little groups to go in the water. They just go down there and join with others who happen to be on their way, and walk more or less single file.

Penguins at Cape Royds
Penguins travel single file to the water to feed.
A lot of pack ice had blown in from the north, so they had to make their way across that to get to the water.
A lot of pack ice had blown in from the north, so they had to make their way across that to get to the water.

 

They’re fast swimmers and sometimes leap in and out of the water like a dolphin. I fired away with my camera and got some shots of wet, fast moving penguins that make them look like rubber dolls:

Penguin swimming
Catching air: this penguin leaped pretty high.
Penguins swimming
Synchronized swimming, penguin style.

The pack ice floated at a good clip. Every day it looked different. On the 12th this iceberg showed up:

Iceberg, Cape Royds
Iceberg that suddenly appeared at Cape Royds.

 

 

 

I tracked a penguin with my camera as he ran up a steep hill with a rock in his beak, which he presented to his mate in the subcolony at the top of the hill. There was an enthusiastic greeting between them. The landscape is rocky, he’s carrying a rock and something about the whole triumphant climb reminded me of the scene in the movie “Rocky” where Sylvester Stallone runs to the top of the long flight of steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. So I titled the video “Rocky.” Watch it on YouTube.

Penguin building nest
Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got: this penguin is probably too young to mate and is just practicing nest building.

Young penguins three to five years old play at nest building, picking up stones and dropping them in a pile. Sometimes they even pair up, and do the whole greeting and changing places routine, but they are too young to breed and don’t lay eggs. Sometimes they make a nuisance of themselves and other penguins chase them away. I saw one in that situation running away who stumbled and slid about 8 feet down a slope on its belly.

Penguin with 3 eggs.
Too much of a good thing: the penguin on the right has three eggs in its nest. That’s too many to properly incubate and definitely too many to care for. [Note: Eventually two chicks hatched and survived.]
Most of the penguins had one egg, many had two, and the one in the photo at left has three. I asked David Ainley and Katie Dugger, lead researchers on the penguin study who were there, how that happened. They said that either the male had had a mate that left and then a new mate that between them had laid three eggs, or one rolled down an incline from another nest. But the prognosis for three eggs is not good. Even if they all hatch, they won’t be able to care for three chicks and they will likely die. [Note: In early January, David Ainley, told me that the penguin couple with three eggs had, against the odds, managed to successfully hatch and care for two chicks.]

The only predator the penguins have to watch out for at Cape Royds, aside from orcas in the water, are skuas, who look for an opportune moment to steal eggs. I saw skuas swoop down and harass the penguins numerous times, but most of the time, the penguins are onto them, and squawk and lean toward them menacingly. The skuas may stand there for a while, but once they know they can’t catch the penguins unaware they tend to fly off.

Skuas harassing penguins
These skuas harassed the penguins to try to get at their eggs, but the penguins were having none of it.

The penguins are unconcerned about the presence of people, however. Sometimes when I was standing in one place for a while, one or two would wander over to check me out. At one point I suddenly looked down to find I had company:

Penguin, Cape Royds
A curious penguin checks me out.

While I was there, Katie was making rounds every other day to check on the banded birds, making notes on the which ones were nesting and how many eggs they had. She has found that although the colony population hasn’t changed since last year, there are fewer nests and fewer eggs. Some nests were created but abandoned. Some pairs made nests but didn’t produce eggs and are just “playing house” as Katie put it. The scientists don’t know the cause of the lack of breeders, but one hypothesis is that something happened during the wintering over period that is making them struggle now.

Katie at work
Katie makes the rounds checking on banded birds, nests and eggs.

The colony at Royds took a major hit when an immense iceberg named B-15 broke off the Ross Ice Shelf and essentially iced in a huge area of McMurdo Sound year round, preventing the sea ice from breaking up in the Antarctic summer. After it broke up in 2005, the colony began to slowly recover, but it has still not achieved its original size, even though there should be enough krill and silverfish for them to eat. You can see that when you look at an overview of the colony and see all the empty spaces that are tan in color where penguins used to nest. More research is needed to understand what is happening in the wintering over period and to look at some of the environmental variables that could be affecting their ability to survive and breed.

Penguin at Cape Royds
Many mysteries remain about the lives of Adelie penguins, especially what happens during the Antarctic winter

 

Nesting Season

Cape Royds penguins
Nesting penguins overlook the sound, which filled with floating icebergs over the past few days. Small groupings like this are called subcolonies. They tend to distribute themselves fairly uniformly, a couple of penguin-lengths apart, and face different directions. Too close, and they get annoyed with each other, and push the interloper away with a squawk.
Banded Adelie penguin, Cape Royds
The researchers keep track of the banded birds to see if they are nesting and have eggs.

It’s my third day at the Cape Royds penguin colony, which consists of Adelie penguins. It’s a relatively small colony, with the larger ones at Cape Crozier and Cape Byrd, and Beaufort Island, which are all less severe environments than Cape Royds, which is basically further south. Katie Dugger, who has been keeping track of the banded birds this season and their nesting activity, estimates that there are a little less than 2,000 breeding pairs, i.e. 4,000 penguins. The ones that haven’t bred go out to sea, but will come back after the chicks have hatched. Right now, at any given time, about half of the birds are on land and their mates are in the water. The eggs have been laid, so they’re swapping places sitting on the nest about every other day. Katie knows this from keeping track of the banded birds. Chicks are banded at the end of each season.

Cape Royds penguin colony with Shackleton's hut.
Cape Royds penguin colony from the top of the trail. The Cape Royds hut used by Ernest Shackleton’s expedition is in the foreground on the left. The body of water in the foreground is a small lake. The sea is behind the hill. This was on one of the days when icebergs had blown in from the north. Where the ground is tan is where the penguins nest. As Jean Pennycook told me, the soil color results from “10,000 years of penguin poop.”

To get to the colony, you walk about 5 to 10 minutes down a trail past one of the historic huts used by Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions. Like other historic huts in the area, the hut and the artifacts and supplies left behind by those early explorers some 100 years ago are maintained and conserved by New Zealanders. The huts are kept locked, and you may only enter with a trained hut guide, who could be a New Zealander or an American. I didn’t come with someone who had the training, so I haven’t been in, but if you’re curious, another photographer with the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, Shaun O’Boyle, did a lot of shooting in there. I highly recommend his blog Portraits of Place in Antarctica. He got here in October and just left. His project involved the architecture and manmade structures here, and he does beautiful work.

Penguin with egg
This penguin has stood up to adjust its position on the egg. This penguin has one egg, but some have two.
Sign and tower at Cape Royds
A camera mounted on the other side of this tower takes the time lapse photos of the colony posted on penguinscience.com. A sign marks the beginning of the protected area. A permit is required to enter.

It’s a protected area, so not anyone can enter. Right now if you watch the penguins, their activities revolve around nesting. They’re either sitting on a nest, occasionally standing up to shift position and settle back down. Or they are picking up rocks in their beaks to add to their mate’s nest. Or they are in the water or coming and going from the water to eat krill and silverfish, their main diet.

Penguins on ice at Cape Royds
Penguins go down to the water to eat, then return to the nest to give their mate a turn.

When they go in the water, they tend to form little groups, then walk to the ice edge together and enter together. They just join whatever other penguins happen to be on their way down the slope to swim.

It’s entertaining to watch them dive into the water. They gather at the edge, mill around a bit, and then they dive in. Here are a couple where I’ve stopped the action:

Penguins at Cape Royds
Heading for the water. Look at those gestures. They’re very human-like. No wonder we are tempted to anthropomorphize them.
Penguins diving, Cape Royds
Semi-synchronized swimming: penguins take the plunge as a group.

So, friends and blog followers, yesterday I figured out how to shoot video with my Nikon SLR. I’m getting better at it as I go along, so I have some good footage already, but the Internet upload speeds are sloooowwww, so I can’t just put them all up at once. My first effort is admittedly not in as good focus as the ones I made today, but it gives you a look at penguins in action nonetheless, and they are, frankly, adorable. You can find the video on YouTube here. As I get them online, I’ll note them in this blog, or just subscribe to my YouTube channel. And of course, Jean Pennycook has posted a lot of photos and videos of this colony at PenguinScience.com.

Penguin on one foot.
This is the only time I saw a penguin get its foot that high, to scratch itself. Jean Pennycook, the PenguinScience.com educator, jokingly calls poses like this “penguin yoga.”
Penguin at Cape Royds
Looks like this bird is doing some Penguin Yoga, too (Sun Salutation?). Sometimes when they stretch like this they also make a sound as if to say, “I’m here!”

A Cape Royds Walk-Around

Penguin on volcanic rock, Cape Royds
Off the beaten track: Most of the penguins hang out in the penguin colony, but a few wander further afield.

On Dec. 9th, I went via helicopter with Evan Miller (the mountaineer you met in previous blog posts) to the Adelie penguin colony at Cape Royds. At the Royds field camp, you are between Mt. Erebus and the Ross Sea. It’s a short hop via helicopter from McMurdo, about 15 minutes, but a completely different landscape. For one thing, McMurdo is still iced in with a thick layer of sea ice but Royds is beyond the sea ice edge, so there’s open water (which is typical for this time of year, though the sea ice broke out here before mid-November, which is on the early side).  Erebus still looms in the distance, and you have more the feeling of being on the lower slopes of a volcano, since there are hills covered with black gravel and rounded stone formations they call volcanic pillows. The “pillows” have rounded protrusions so uniform in size it looks like an archaeological site where some ancient civilization had built stone walls by piling stones, but of course that’s not the case at all. Some of the structures that look like a wall made of a pile of stones are in face, one big rock.

Royds_1209-37
Evan walks through a typical landscape around here, filled with black volcanic rock.

Evan was sent to accompany me for the first 24 hours to explore the site so I knew where I could orient myself so I could walk safely on my own for the rest of my stay. So on that very windy afternoon when we arrived, after lunch we set off on a walk toward the small lakes to the north and then looped back along a ridge that overlooks the coastline. The penguin colony itself we decided to save for the next day, since that’s terrain that I would not need the know-how of an experienced mountaineer to explore.

Right now there are two women working here, field camp manager and outreach educator Jean Pennycook and wildlife biologist Katie Dugger. Katie is leaving in the next few days, and her colleague David Ainley, the scientist who established this study, will take over her daily monitoring of the penguins. Jean makes sure the camp is supplied and is busy with outreach activities, making Skype calls to classrooms all over the world from the colony via her iPad, communicating with schoolteachers and updating the Cape Royds penguin project’s fabulous web site at penguinscience.com, which I highly recommend if you have any interest in learning more about penguins. There is information there for any level of education, from kindergarten to college. If you have kids, show them the site and tell their teacher about it! You’re probably saying, all right already, enough with the exposition, let’s see some penguins! So, even though this is out of order, here’s a quick peek. I promise more penguins up close and personal in the next post.

Penguin colony, Cape Royds
A portion of the main penguin colony at Cape Royds with scattered remains of one of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s structures. One of his huts is here, and as with all the early explorers’ huts, any debris that is scattered around the grounds, even broken glass or bits of bones from their dinner, is left undisturbed and you are not supposed to touch it. Why is the ground tan? As Jean put it, “That’s about 10,000 years of penguin poop.”

 

 

Evan and I found the larger lakes:

Cape Royds, frozen lake
Clear Lake, one of the frozen inland lakes.

…and smaller  ponds:

Cape Royds inland pond
The penguin folks call this one Skua Lake, since skuas often hang out here. You can see Inaccessible Island out in the Ross Sea in the distance on the right.

 

And volcanic rocks worn by the wind, called ventifacts:

Ventifact, Cape Royds
The vocabulary word of the day is “ventifacts.” These are rocks eroded by the wind into unusual and striking shapes.

 

Marker at Cape Royds
Evan and I also encountered this post on our walk. Jean didn’t recognize it. Maybe it’s a marker from a previous study. Anybody know what it is? Click image to enlarge it.

As we walked, Evan and I happened upon a nesting skua, sitting on an egg. She hyah-hyah-hyahed at us to warn us off for a while, and then stepped off the nest and took a few steps toward us as if to say, “Hey, I mean it, get the hell out!” So we made a big circle and ended up at a distance from the other side of the nest. Evidently that was good enough for her, and she walked back to her nest and settled back in, but we got a quick glimpse of the egg (photos below).

Skua on nest
If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave me and my egg alone!
Skua returning to nest
Good, they’re going away! Don’t worry, little egg, Mommy’s back to keep you warm.

We had, it turns out, inadvertently walked into a major skua nesting area. We kept seeing nesting pairs. Most either ignored us or squawked a little as we walked by but suddenly Evan was being dive bombed by a skua, who kept swooping down within a few feet of his head. Why it went after him and not me, who knows? Maybe because he was taller? But we walked faster and got out of there.

 

 

Coming over the ridge we saw the sea. The open water was a contrast to the unending vista of flat sea ice from McMurdo:

Cape Royds view of sea
Our first day at Cape Royds, the wind was blowing from the south and beyond the pressure ridge was clear open water. See the pressure ridge formation a little to the right of center, where there’s a rectangular chunk with a hole in it and another piece with a little stalk to its right? Now look at the photo below from 24 hours later, after the winds had shifted.
Pressure ridge and floating ice, Cape Royds
What a difference a day makes: 24 hours later, the winds had shifted, blowing in sea ice. See the formations from the previous photo, now on the left in the foreground? Notice all the ice that’s come in behind them.

 

 

 

Cape Royds Camp
That’s my tent in the center, Jean’s on the left, and the main hut on the right, one roughly 9 x 15 foot room where we do all our cooking, working at our laptops, store the non-refrigerated food (a large picnic cooler set in the great outdoors serves as the camp “freezer”) and warm up if necessary — there’s a propane heater in the hut. The sleeping bags and fleece liners they gave us are incredibly warm and believe it or not, I’m completely comfortable sleeping in the tent in same short-sleeved PJs I wear at home, even though the tent is unheated and outdoors it’s probably been in the 20s with wind chill. An eyeshade is a must, though, as the bright yellow tent lets in the sunlight 24 hours a day.

The winds were blowing stiffly from the south all day. We kept waiting for them to calm down in order to set up my tent, but that wasn’t happening. So I got a one-on-one lesson from a certified National Outdoor Leadership instructor on best practices for setting it up in the wind.

 

 

 

 

Penguin, Cape Royds campsite
A penguin stopped by while I was putting my belongings in my tent. Now there’s a sentence I’ve never written before.

 

However, Katie assured us that the forecast called for the winds to die down and shift direction after midnight. The next day we were surprised to see that indeed they had, and the sound had filled with sea ice blown in by the winds coming from the north. Giant slabs of ice were moving briskly along.

 

Sea ice, Cape Royds
C the ICC: Another view of the sea ice that blew in overnight. Everything that’s clean and white beyond the dark ridge wasn’t there the day before.

 

 

 

 

 

Earlier on the second day that we were here, when the above photo was taken, I also took one looking south. It was a nice sunny day and you could see the sea ice edge, and the very same iceberg I photographed on the excursion several days ago that I spoke about in an earlier post:

Inaccessible Island from Cape Royds
The sea ice edge, Inaccessible Island, and the iceberg I photographed several days before were visible in the distance from Cape Royds.

On that second day’s walk, we also walked down the steep slope to a black sand beach. We encountered the lone penguin you see in the first picture in this blog post. Walking along the beach are interesting snow and ice formations, big and small. I’ll end this post with a couple more:

Cape Royds
Looking up from the black sand beach.
Pressure ridge, Cape Royds
I never get tired of pressure ridges! Across the sound are the mountains.
Mt. Erebus from Cape Royds campsite
The view I wake up to: lava pillows and Erebus. It’s an austere place, but a wonderfully peaceful one.