Penguin Dispatch 1: Arriving in Punta Tombo, Argentina
The winter residents of Punta Tombo fly in steadily over the course of a few days, eventually swarming the small land mass
- By Eric Wagner
- Smithsonian.com, June 04, 2009, Subscribe
On a mid-September evening off the southern coast of Argentina, throngs of Magellanic penguins dart and bob and weave in the surf. I watch as one dives underwater, flicks its wings and glides towards the shore, a swift shadow in a breaking wave. It pulls up with a neat, tight turn and hops onto the beach, where its feet promptly become entangled in a piece of kelp, and it falls on its face. Somewhat resignedly (or so it seems to me), it rights itself, shakes off and starts a slow, metronomic trudge up to the berm, joining hundreds of other penguins on their way to nests that may be more than half a mile inland. These birds have not set foot on land in almost six months, and it shows.
I am at Punta Tombo, a gnarled twig of earth that twists off the edge of Patagonia. About two miles long and barely a third of a mile at its widest, the peninsula is home to a community of resilient animals and plants that endure the region’s desert climate. Guanacos—a relative of the llama—delicately nibble molle bushes, avoiding four-inch-long spines; armadillos and skunks and scorpions scurry underfoot. On the rocky shores, southern sea lions and elephant seals haul out to bake in the sun, and southern right whales and pods of orcas occasionally swim past.
One doesn’t expect to find penguins in a desert environment—when the ship’s historian on Magellan’s voyage first saw them in 1520, he called them “strange geese.” But here they are, the largest colony of Magellanic penguins in the world, and one of the largest colonies of penguins outside of Antarctica.
As penguins go, the Magellanic is medium-sized, with a heavy hooked bill and a confrontational temperament. It is one of the four so-called jackass penguins celebrated for their bray, a physically exacting display of huffing and bellowing that is comic during the day but less so as it carries on all night.
Every year, close to 200,000 pairs of these strange geese come to Punta Tombo to breed. Males return first, to nests that they have used year after year after year; females follow about two weeks later. The arrival of nearly half a million penguins ought to be a dramatic affair, but it is surprisingly subtle, more steady trickle than flood. Where once there were no penguins, soon there are dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. After a few days, I can spin in frantic circles, and it seems that I am surrounded. Penguins stand at my feet, wagging their heads at me; penguins rest on the ground a short distance off, wagging their heads at me; penguins frown out from burrows, wagging their heads at me.
I’m told, though, that I should have seen this place ten, twenty, thirty years ago, when a penguin really was under every bush (sometimes two or three or ten in an uneasy truce), and the burrows were stacked one on top of another, and the billboards in nearby Trelew that promised 1.000.000 de Pinguinos en Punta Tombo! weren’t exaggerating. But the colony is shrinking. Since 1987, the number of active nests has declined by more than 20 percent. Some of the decline is due to oil discharged from ships, which, although not as bad as it used to be, still coats penguins along their migration routes. And all up and down the Argentine coast, increased fishing puts humans in competition with penguins as both diligently pursue the same food. Other threats, too, most notably climate change and its accompanying uncertainties, constitute a new challenge. Researchers are trying to understand how, in the face of a suddenly mutable planet, the penguins will adapt—and whether they’ll be able to adapt quickly enough.
Leading the research effort at Punta Tombo is Dee Boersma, a professor at the University of Washington who has been called the Jane Goodall of penguins. For the six-month field season, I will work under her tutelage with a team of scientists and volunteers to watch the Magellanic penguins and see how they persevere on their thin slice of the changing world. I will visit them at dawn and dusk and all times in between. I will help count them, weigh them and measure them. I will see who mates with whom. In short, I will immerse myself in their lives to such a degree that all my conversations will become penguin-themed, all my jokes will have penguins lurking somewhere in the punch line and all my dreams will be infused with penguins. (Or, rather, they would, if the penguin living under my trailer would ever shut up.)
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