It is, then, pretty remote.<\/p>\n
It stays open, and habitable, thanks to resupply from the sea. Along the 25km leading from the base to the shore, every 500m they plonked down an oil drum to trace the route.<\/p>\n
This created an unexpected difficulty. Occasionally, a penguin would spot one. \u201cPenguins, just being curious things, would see something in the distance: a small black thing that looked like a penguin,\u201d Fretwell says, sitting in his Cambridge office among lots of penguin pictures.<\/p>\n
So, from the shoreline, the penguins would waddle inland to investigate. They would be disappointed. \u201cWhen they got there, they found it wasn\u2019t a penguin; it was a drum.\u201d They hadn\u2019t made a new friend after all. \u201cBut then they would look and see another one. And they would walk over.\u201d Fifty oil drums later, they would find themselves at the Halley base. \u201cEvery year, we would have to put the penguins into a snowmobile and take them back again.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Peter Fretwell in Antarctica last year. \u201cAs humans, we just have this affinity with them\u201d<\/p>\n
BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY<\/p>\n
Fretwell never thought he\u2019d become a penguin taxi driver, let alone, as it happens, the world\u2019s penguin counter-in-chief. He never thought, when he started his career, that he would end up writing a book about penguins, commissioned by Penguin, which seems delighted by the fact there is now a Penguin book full of penguins.<\/p>\n
Fretwell\u2019s not a zoologist. He\u2019s not even a conservationist. He\u2019s a cartographer. But it turns out that when the maps you make are of the Antarctic<\/a>, the continent\u2019s most charismatic creature becomes unavoidable. \u201cI think we just, as humans, have this affinity with them.\u201d<\/p>\n And when, looking at satellite images mapping the continent, he spotted the signs of emperor penguin colonies \u2014 often in places where humans have never set foot \u2014 he realised a personal interest in penguins could also be of scientific interest.<\/p>\n \u2022 Read more wildlife and nature stories<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cBefore, we didn\u2019t know where the emperor colonies were, how many there were, what the distribution was.\u201d Suddenly we did. \u201cIt was revelatory.\u201d<\/p>\n So, in 2009 he mapped the penguin colonies of Antarctica. Then they got higher-resolution satellite images and he and his colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey began to count the penguins inside the colonies. \u201cIt was the first time a wild animal had been surveyed from space.\u201d They did a penguin census.<\/p>\n Then, once they had a few years of data, he began to realise that those numbers were very much going in the wrong direction. And he got worried.<\/p>\n The emperor penguin is one of the animals in the world least likely to meet a human. But it looked like humans may make it extinct nevertheless.<\/p>\n \u2018The first penguin I saw was very charismatic\u2019<\/p>\n To see a penguin colony from space, you don\u2019t look for penguins; you look for poo. Penguins on TV look cute and fluffy. In the flesh, they are a little less appealing. \u201cIt really is quite, quite smelly,\u201d Fretwell says. \u201cI\u2019ve camped near penguin colonies. For the first couple of days, it takes the skin off the back of your throat. It\u2019s sulphurous. Then you become noseblind.\u201d<\/p>\n Penguins make so much guano, in fact, that over the course of the season the colony slowly moves upwind to escape it, leaving a brown smear across the ice. It was this that could be seen from space. There are penguin colonies in places humans have never visited that we now know about because of their poo smears.<\/p>\n Despite the poo, despite the noseblindness, Fretwell confesses to being seduced by penguins. Most people are.<\/p>\n The emperor penguin colony at Snow Hill Island in the Weddell Sea<\/p>\n GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n He saw his first one in 2006. That was on the Falkland Islands<\/a>, a stopover on the way to the Antarctic. It was a small Magellanic penguin in its burrow. \u201cIt was just sticking its head out. It was very charismatic.\u201d<\/p>\n But why, I ask, was it charismatic? What is it about penguins? What was it about seeing a little black and white head poking out of a hole that seduced him? Why do we have penguin books and penguin chocolates and Pingu? Why, in short, do humans like penguins?<\/p>\n He thinks. \u201cThey\u2019re curious, they\u2019re cheeky, they\u2019re clumsy.\u201d They stand on two legs. \u201cProbably it helps that they are one of the very few animals that look a little bit like people.\u201d<\/p>\n They also haven\u2019t known humans for long enough to be scared of humans. He remembers visiting colonies and the penguins coming right up to him. \u201cThey don\u2019t really understand what we are, so you can walk up to them and they\u2019ll come and peck your shoes.\u201d Tagging them for science is easy. \u201cYou just grab them. It only takes a few minutes. Then they\u2019ll scuttle away and turn around and frown at us.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018You\u2019ve got to be careful not to anthropomorphise them\u2019<\/p>\n Are they really frowning? There is something so human-like about penguins that you can\u2019t avoid ascribing emotions to them. He warns about this a lot in his book, as he takes us through different penguin behaviours and species and urges us to think of them as wild creatures, not people. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to be careful not to anthropomorphise them.\u201d<\/p>\n But, I protest, several times in the book he will go on to anthropomorphise them anyway. Because, well, when you are describing a little waddling comedy waiter, it\u2019s hard to resist. He concedes the point. \u201cWell, at least I apologise for it.\u201d<\/p>\n Two years ago, he went to visit a colony and it was a little less comical. Most of his book is about penguin science and history. Only sparingly does he include his own experiences. But he allows himself an epilogue to describe what happened in 2023. He had landed at the Snow Hill colony. Emperor penguins only exist on continental Antarctica, and this was their most northerly colony. It was early spring, when the chicks attain \u201cmaximum cuteness\u201d.<\/p>\n Their fluffy feathers, perfect for Attenborough documentaries and Christmas cards, are an adaptation. They insulate the birds against the cold while they grow. But they are also a vulnerability. They are useless if they get wet.<\/p>\n It had been warm here and in places the surface had melted, forming pools of water in the ice. Some of these had then refrozen. As Fretwell walked carefully between the pools, he noticed dark shapes in the water beneath. Intrigued, he peered closer. They were chicks.<\/p>\n They had fallen in, got wet and \u201cturned into little ice cubes\u201d. There were hundreds. It was, he said, like a horror movie.<\/p>\n A few years ago, the ice collapsed. \u2018Bang \u2014 it\u2019s gone\u2019<\/p>\n Melt pools in ice are one problem. Loss of all the ice is another, bigger one. If the sea ice goes too soon, as happened in 2022, then the chicks fall in and die in their thousands.<\/p>\n For a long time, this didn\u2019t seem to be a concern. The ice held out. For a few years it even became a bit of a gotcha for climate sceptics. So-called scientists tell us the ice will all melt, they said \u2014 but look at Antarctica, which is as icy as ever.<\/p>\n The argument was really annoying for climate scientists<\/a> because there was a truth to it. You didn\u2019t need sophisticated models to tell you a warming world meant less ice, yet there wasn\u2019t less ice. No one really knew why that was.<\/p>\n Then, a few years ago, the ice collapsed \u2014 far faster than the models had predicted. \u201cIt\u2019s just flipped,\u201d Fretwell says. \u201cBang \u2014 it\u2019s gone.\u201d With it, the arguments collapsed too. Last year, the peak ice was about 10 per cent below what it should have been \u2014 at least six or seven Britains-worth had gone. Again, no one knew why. But with that ice collapse, Fretwell saw a corresponding, and larger, penguin collapse.<\/p>\n Since 2010, their numbers have fallen by a fifth. There was modelling of what the population might do because of climate change. That modelling showed that by 2100 the population may disappear. His worry was that the drop he saw was already worse than the modelling.<\/p>\n Historical descriptions of penguins were generally culinary<\/p>\n Penguins really should have learnt to fear humans by now.<\/p>\n On the voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1497, a sailor described some strange black and white birds. They were, he said, \u201cas big as ducks, but can\u2019t fly because they have no feathers on their wings\u201d. Naturally, a bird that can\u2019t fly away meant one thing: lunch. \u201cThese birds, of which we slaughtered as many as we could, cried like donkeys.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1520, Magellan\u2019s visit made more penguins cry like donkeys. \u201cThe geese [sic] were so many that it was impossible to count them; we filled the five ships with them for an hour\u2026 They are so fat that they were difficult to pluck, but we took off their skin.\u201d Francis Drake\u2019s expedition, later that century, concurred on the plumpness front. \u201cTheir skins cannot be taken from their bodyes without tearing off the flesh, because of their exceeding fatnes,\u201d the ship\u2019s priest wrote approvingly.<\/p>\n \u2022 Endangered Antarctic emperor penguins spotted from space<\/a><\/p>\n Over the centuries that followed, the descriptions of penguins were generally culinary. The meat is, apparently, fishy. So are their eggs, if you can imagine a fishy egg. Fretwell hasn\u2019t eaten penguin, but he has colleagues who have. Until the 21st century, it was standard to boost the calories on an Antarctic expedition with fresh penguin meat.<\/p>\n When chroniclers weren\u2019t talking about how penguins are to eat (sufficiently bad, actually, that aficionados ranked them below cormorants), they were rhapsodising about how good they are to fight. \u201cThe penguins disputed our landing,\u201d wrote one excited 19th-century explorer. \u201cIt was not until great slaughter was made, and a lane cut through them, that we could proceed.\u201d As with indigenous tribesmen, so with flightless birds.<\/p>\n However many penguins humans have eaten or bayoneted, though, it\u2019s nothing compared with the number dispatched by the so-called penguin digester.<\/p>\n In the late 19th century, a New Zealander called Joseph Hatch invented a device for converting a penguin into oil. His motto was, \u201cA pint a penguin.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/\/1292ab0e-8040-45c0-9731-5a835337fa71.jpg\")
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