At a distance, an oil drum looks quite a bit like a penguin. Well, not that much like a penguin, but if you’re short-sighted and live in a world in which anything that isn’t white is either a rock or a penguin — if, in other words, you’re a penguin — then there’s more than a passing resemblance.
This is relevant because when Peter Fretwell was at Halley Station, the British Antarctic Survey’s remote base, they would use oil drums as waymarkers.
This research station is unlike any habitation in the world. It is built on stilts on an ice shelf. The nearest humans are normally a couple of hundred kilometres away. Every now and then, the population within 1,000km increases by a significant proportion — that’s when the International Space Station goes over.
It is, then, pretty remote.
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.
This created an unexpected difficulty. Occasionally, a penguin would spot one. “Penguins, just being curious things, would see something in the distance: a small black thing that looked like a penguin,” Fretwell says, sitting in his Cambridge office among lots of penguin pictures.
So, from the shoreline, the penguins would waddle inland to investigate. They would be disappointed. “When they got there, they found it wasn’t a penguin; it was a drum.” They hadn’t made a new friend after all. “But then they would look and see another one. And they would walk over.” Fifty oil drums later, they would find themselves at the Halley base. “Every year, we would have to put the penguins into a snowmobile and take them back again.”
Peter Fretwell in Antarctica last year. “As humans, we just have this affinity with them”
BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY
Fretwell never thought he’d become a penguin taxi driver, let alone, as it happens, the world’s 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.
Fretwell’s not a zoologist. He’s not even a conservationist. He’s a cartographer. But it turns out that when the maps you make are of the Antarctic, the continent’s most charismatic creature becomes unavoidable. “I think we just, as humans, have this affinity with them.”
And when, looking at satellite images mapping the continent, he spotted the signs of emperor penguin colonies — often in places where humans have never set foot — he realised a personal interest in penguins could also be of scientific interest.
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“Before, we didn’t know where the emperor colonies were, how many there were, what the distribution was.” Suddenly we did. “It was revelatory.”
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. “It was the first time a wild animal had been surveyed from space.” They did a penguin census.
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.
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.
‘The first penguin I saw was very charismatic’
To see a penguin colony from space, you don’t look for penguins; you look for poo. Penguins on TV look cute and fluffy. In the flesh, they are a little less appealing. “It really is quite, quite smelly,” Fretwell says. “I’ve camped near penguin colonies. For the first couple of days, it takes the skin off the back of your throat. It’s sulphurous. Then you become noseblind.”
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.
Despite the poo, despite the noseblindness, Fretwell confesses to being seduced by penguins. Most people are.
The emperor penguin colony at Snow Hill Island in the Weddell Sea
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He saw his first one in 2006. That was on the Falkland Islands, a stopover on the way to the Antarctic. It was a small Magellanic penguin in its burrow. “It was just sticking its head out. It was very charismatic.”
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?
He thinks. “They’re curious, they’re cheeky, they’re clumsy.” They stand on two legs. “Probably it helps that they are one of the very few animals that look a little bit like people.”
They also haven’t known humans for long enough to be scared of humans. He remembers visiting colonies and the penguins coming right up to him. “They don’t really understand what we are, so you can walk up to them and they’ll come and peck your shoes.” Tagging them for science is easy. “You just grab them. It only takes a few minutes. Then they’ll scuttle away and turn around and frown at us.”
‘You’ve got to be careful not to anthropomorphise them’
Are they really frowning? There is something so human-like about penguins that you can’t 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. “You’ve got to be careful not to anthropomorphise them.”
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’s hard to resist. He concedes the point. “Well, at least I apologise for it.”
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 “maximum cuteness”.
Fretwell with an emperor penguin in Antarctica. “Last year, the peak ice was about 10 per cent below what it should have been”
BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY
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.
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.
They had fallen in, got wet and “turned into little ice cubes”. There were hundreds. It was, he said, like a horror movie.
A few years ago, the ice collapsed. ‘Bang — it’s gone’
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.
For a long time, this didn’t 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 — but look at Antarctica, which is as icy as ever.
The argument was really annoying for climate scientists because there was a truth to it. You didn’t need sophisticated models to tell you a warming world meant less ice, yet there wasn’t less ice. No one really knew why that was.
Then, a few years ago, the ice collapsed — far faster than the models had predicted. “It’s just flipped,” Fretwell says. “Bang — it’s gone.” With it, the arguments collapsed too. Last year, the peak ice was about 10 per cent below what it should have been — 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.
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.
Historical descriptions of penguins were generally culinary
Penguins really should have learnt to fear humans by now.
On the voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1497, a sailor described some strange black and white birds. They were, he said, “as big as ducks, but can’t fly because they have no feathers on their wings”. Naturally, a bird that can’t fly away meant one thing: lunch. “These birds, of which we slaughtered as many as we could, cried like donkeys.”
In 1520, Magellan’s visit made more penguins cry like donkeys. “The geese [sic] were so many that it was impossible to count them; we filled the five ships with them for an hour… They are so fat that they were difficult to pluck, but we took off their skin.” Francis Drake’s expedition, later that century, concurred on the plumpness front. “Their skins cannot be taken from their bodyes without tearing off the flesh, because of their exceeding fatnes,” the ship’s priest wrote approvingly.
• Endangered Antarctic emperor penguins spotted from space
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’t 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.
When chroniclers weren’t 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. “The penguins disputed our landing,” wrote one excited 19th-century explorer. “It was not until great slaughter was made, and a lane cut through them, that we could proceed.” As with indigenous tribesmen, so with flightless birds.
However many penguins humans have eaten or bayoneted, though, it’s nothing compared with the number dispatched by the so-called penguin digester.
In the late 19th century, a New Zealander called Joseph Hatch invented a device for converting a penguin into oil. His motto was, “A pint a penguin.”
The digester, with a 1,000-penguin capacity, would be set up in the middle of a colony — king penguins, from the Antarctic islands, were favoured. An eyewitness from Shackleton’s expedition described the process that followed.
“The birds are driven along the pens or runs and right up to the top of the digester. Near the top of this boiler a man stands with a club, and as each bird reaches the top he hits it over the head and so knocks it into the boiler. Owing to the hardiness of most of the birds this blow only stuns them, and many go into the boiler alive.”
After days of boiling at pressure, out came the requisite pints of penguin oil. Three million or so pints, in fact, by the time public outrage led to the end of the practice.
Most will never see a human. But we guide their destiny
And yet penguins, as a collective if not individuals, survived all this. They have survived the invasive species — the cats and rats — that ravage their eggs. They have survived the fisheries that take their krill — one irony is that the collapse of whale populations has meant there is probably more to go round. Some species are indeed critically endangered. You don’t want to be a South African penguin. But others have gone on to thrive. There are 10 million Adélie penguins, the 70cm-high birds that bounce around rocky Antarctic shores. There are 13 million macaronis, the cheery mohicanned penguins who prefer the sub-Antarctic islands.
Generally, the further they are from humans, the better they’ve done. Generally.
The Antarctic dark is about to end. Winter is losing its grip. As spring arrives, the new chicks will see the sun for the first time as it rises weakly above the horizon.
Some, later, may see oil drums. They may even follow them and see people. Yet most will live, grow up, give birth and die all without seeing a trace of a human.
Yet humans are guiding their destiny. To reiterate, since Fretwell first peered at the guano-soaked ice in 2009, the population appears to have dropped by 20 per cent. They need that ice, and it’s going.
“It’s a warning,” he says. He just doesn’t know how we can act on it. He also knows a lot can happen, there’s a lot we don’t know about climate systems — and that, so far, a lot of ice remains. There is time.
“Emperor penguins are what we think about when we think about penguins. Penguins are loved. If we let this animal go because Antarctica is changing so quickly, it really doesn’t reflect well on us.”
The Penguin Book of Penguins: An Expert’s Guide to the World’s Most Beloved Bird by Peter Fretwell and Lisa Fretwell (Viking, £14.99). Order from timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Discount for Times+ members