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RedditOver the course of her career, Dee Boersma has authored or co-authored more than a hundred scientific papers, book chapters, articles and reports. Almost every sentence she utters, every casual observation she makes as she walks through the field, has as its foundation a blizzard of data points. The most common data point comes from a flipper band, a stainless steel teardrop that gives a penguin its unique scientific identity. Dee and revolving crews of field workers have banded close to 60,000 penguins during her quarter century at Punta Tombo. These bands explain how, when she walks up to a particular nest, she usually knows the penguin standing next to it and can recall its particular history.
They also explain how I find myself standing in front of a bristly ojo de vibro, or snake-eye bush, festooned with green, pink, and blue flags. The male penguin glowering out at me—35472—is in Tombo parlance a known-age bird, meaning that it was banded as a chick (1989 in his case). He has nested under this bush for five years and was first measured as an adult in 1995. Apparently, it’s time to take his vitals again.
“Go ahead and get him,” says Ginger Rebstock, a researcher in Boersma’s lab. She has been coming to Punta Tombo for seven years. Wrangling penguins is old hat for her.
I peer down at 35472. He suddenly looks very large and menacing. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah” says Ginger. “Just reach in and grab him. And make sure you get a good grip on his neck.” She shares a couple of gruesome anecdotes about former field workers who didn’t get good grips. Slashed-up arms and hands figure prominently, as do—yikes—newly pierced bellybuttons. During this recital, 35472 begins to suspect that something is afoot. He puffs himself up and starts snorting.
I blanch. “Mm, okay.” I reach in with my gauncho—basically, a three-foot-long shepherd’s crook made of rebar and wrapped with duct tape—and hook 35472 by his stubby leg. I make to pull him out, he expresses his vehement disapproval, and we scuffle a little.
It is at this point that I realize there are things about a penguin that one can never fully know, never fully understand, until one is trying to grip a penguin perilously between one’s own thighs. Then, one acquires a most anxious appreciation for the more fantastic elements of penguin physiology. For instance: A penguin’s chest all but bursts with thick slabs of breast muscle, and its wings, with which 35472 is spiritedly beating me, are solid bone. Its bill (I think I already mentioned the hook) has been honed over the millennia to hold onto squirmy anchovy and hake and squid, which is why 35472 can so easily shred my industrial-strength field pants. And its eyes can look surprisingly demonic.
I manage to haul 35472 out. If I didn’t think it would be sporting to use my superior advantages in height and weight before, I have no qualms about it now, and I sit on him. He stares at me balefully and I beg forgiveness, pleading science, as Ginger measures his bill length and depth, his flipper and his foot. Then she steps away and I let him go. He rockets back into his nest, turns, and brays in my face.
As I scramble to safety, I get a good look at one last feature: the denticles that run the length of his tongue and upper mandible. These are fleshy protuberances, like super-sized taste buds, that, in congress with the hooked bill, are used to grip slick food. Up close, I can see each one of 35472’s denticles. I can see down his throat. I can smell his warm, fishy breath. We move to the next nest. At some point, perhaps, these measurements will work their way into a sentence or casual comment. I hope whoever hears that sentence is properly appreciative. Words are hard won at Punta Tombo.
Read Penguin Dispatch 4: How to Study a Penguin Egg
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