Tragedy in Black and White

By ELIZABETH ROYTE
Published: December 10, 2010


In the austral summer of 2005-6, the veteran magazine journalist Fen Montaigne traveled to Palmer Station in Antarctica to work with the highly regarded polar ecologist Bill Fraser. For nearly five months, Montaigne gamely weighed and banded Adélie penguins and their predators, attached radio tags to feathers, dodged shooting streams of gack (giant-petrel vomit), sifted through guano in search of silverfish otoliths and reveled in the sensory delights of “the most alien and beautiful place on the planet.”
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Fen Montaigne

Adélie penguins struggle to save eggs submerged by snowmelt.

FRASER’S PENGUINS

A Journey to the Future in Antarctica

By Fen Montaigne

Illustrated. 288 pp. A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt & Company. $26
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Excerpt: ‘Fraser’s Penguins’ (Google Books)

But this is no straightforward work of natural history with Fraser as heroic guide. It’s a morality tale, in which Fraser plays an unsociable Cassandra who’s entrusted his tidings to a sympathetic messenger. Luckily for readers, Montaigne has wrapped his portrait of a place on the brink of oblivion inside a penguin love fest.

Bill Fraser has been closely observing and recording the habits of birds near Palmer Station for 35 years. Such depth of experience allowed him to notice some troubling changes. Adélie penguin colonies, and the brown skuas that depend on them for sustenance, were rapidly declining; chinstrap penguins were moving in; and the population of fur seals and leopard seals was on the rise. What was going on?

Laboriously pondering factors biological and meteorological, Fraser eventually linked local Adélie declines with the cascade effects of warmer winter air and sea temperatures along the peninsula. Higher temperatures bring more snow, which delays the start of mating and nesting season, which results in smaller penguin chicks and a higher mortality rate. Warmer seas reduce the extent of sea ice, which krill (penguin food) depend on and Adélies rest upon before launching foraging trips into the Southern Ocean.

It gets worse: with adult penguins traveling farther to fill their bellies, chicks are left vulnerable to those skuas. Predators from hell, skuas rule Adélie colonies with “Mafia-like domination,” Montaigne writes, ripping the heads off chicks and eating the krill from their stomachs while they’re still alive.

Climate change is warming the poles faster than many other places on the planet, which means that polar scientists are coming to grips with these changes sooner than most anyone else. “Fraser’s Penguins,” portions of which appeared in The New Yorker, warns that what’s happening on the Antarctic Peninsula now is a taste of unsettling changes, elsewhere, to come. Should the West Antarctic Ice Sheet continue to melt, global sea levels could rise dramatically, in one NASA scientist’s opinion inundating Washington — and other coastal cities — by the end of this century.

For Fraser, the warming has a moral dimension. The Antarctic has been virtually untouched by man, and it’s a place where humans are, as many visitors over roughly 200 years of exploration have noted, entirely inconsequential. But now, the long carbonic reach of industrialized society is quickly wiping out one of the toughest creatures on earth, a species that’s hard-wired to the polar desert and cannot adapt.

Montaigne is a controlled writer, offering careful and clear explanations of matters technical and lexicographic, biologically microscopic and meteorologically global. But it’s his descriptive prowess, his ability to evoke lavender — and cobalt, magenta and violet — without waxing purple, that most impresses. Sounds and smells are skillfully conveyed: the flippers of two fighting Adélies sound like “the thumping of a stick on a carpet being cleaned.” While some team members compare the smell of a newly hatched penguin to Doritos, Montaigne associates the aroma with “the scent of my dog’s paws.” After being stalked and nearly pounced upon by a killer whale, Montaigne writes, “I was so amazed by this performance that I cannot remember exactly what the orca looked like.” Sometimes telling less reveals more. At other times, Montaigne gives thrilling, blow-by-blow accounts of bird battles and breakups.

Drama-wise, the penguins put the resident biologists to shame. This reader was slightly disappointed that Montaigne only briefly discusses cocktails served over thousand-year-old ice, diving into 34-­degree water and celebrating an engagement with a four-foot-long penis ice sculpture that ejaculates cheap Champagne. The birding team is “collegial and free of tension”; one Andy of Mayberry type habitually says “We’re done-dee” when a field task is completed.

Instead, Montaigne lets the Adélies chew up the scenery — their epic migration, territorial squabbling, nesting-stone thievery, philandering, stoicism (Fraser has seen penguins almost cut in half by leopard seals stagger back to the colony to deliver their load of krill), indifference to squalor and enslavement to their squawking chicks (at least until the little darlings reach fledgling weight, at which point their parents turn their backs on the creatures and dive into the sea).

Fraser himself remains more of an enigma, a man who’s happiest spending long stretches alone in inhospitable places. Montaigne tells us that Fraser is not on speaking terms with another penguin scientist, and that he’s “not a man you would want to cross,” but we never see this play out. Still, one admires both the subject’s reserve and the author’s respect for it.

Adélie penguins, like other polar species, have always faced daunting challenges. But today, Adélies are confronting conditions for which nothing in their evolutionary history has prepared them. According to Fraser, the colonies around Palmer Station have reached a tipping point: they’ll be gone within his lifetime.

Despite this sobering message, “Fraser’s Penguins” leaves one feeling exhilarated — by these remarkable creatures, the landscape they inhabit and the scientists who’ve devoted their lives to studying both.

Elizabeth Royte’s latest book is “Bottle­mania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle Over America’s Drinking Water.”
A version of this review appeared in print on December 12, 2010, on page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review.