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Feeding the Newborn Penguin
An adult penguin, recently back from a foraging trip, responds to the cheeping of its two-week-old chick and feeds it
It’s barely 9:30 on a late-November morning, but the temperature is already 88 degrees Fahrenheit. A hot, dry wind is plastering grit to my face. I am in the middle of the day’s area checks, visiting nests and noting the presence of eggs (or their absence, if something has made off with them). It is a routine, and a comfortable one save for the heat and dust. But it is about to change.
At a nest under a quilumbai bush, the female’s comportment is somehow different, although I can’t immediately say why. Her stance, maybe? She seems more nervous than usual, and is straddling something rather than sitting on it. When I peer in, I see that two halves of serrated egg shell are pushed into the back of the nest. In their place beneath the female’s brood patch is a tiny bedraggled chick, newly hatched and exhausted from the effort.
Using the versatile egg cup, I retrieve the chick. Its down is grey, its feet fleshy and pink, and its budding flippers are soft as felt. It weighs a little bit more than a tennis ball and can’t yet open its eyes. It is, of course, the most adorable thing on the planet. More chicks hatch throughout the day, the week. Area checks leave me bedazzled, as I go to a nest to measure its chicks, declare them the cutest in the colony, move to the next nest, declare its chicks the cutest, and so on.
Punta Tombo now rings with the clamor of begging. Adults shuttle food back and forth in a frantic effort to keep pace with their offsprings’ voracity. The chicks are insatiably hungry and can triple their weight every ten days. Often, I find them lolling in a surfeited daze, their stomachs distended to the point of splitting. I have to be careful not to squeeze too hard for fear that they might vomit all over me; I’m already tired of getting pooped on all the time.
Dee, however, is thrilled. “Tight as a tick!” she likes to exclaim when she measures a fat chick as it struggles sluggishly. “You’re just as tight as a tick!” To my mind this isn’t the most endearing image, no matter how apt, but Dee says it every time with the same fresh enthusiasm.
For about a month after their chicks hatch, the adults will never be away from the nest for longer than 36 hours at a time. But as the season progresses and the chicks need more to eat, the parents may leave for up to a week to forage.
“Penguins follow their food, and their food follows ocean fronts,” Dee says, referring to highly productive sites where fish amass. “So if the fronts move farther north and the food moves with them, the penguins have to go, too. And we’re finding that that is what is happening.” Recent satellite data show that the penguins at Punta Tombo are swimming on average 37 miles farther on their foraging trips than they did a decade ago. The extra distance means that penguins must hurry if they want to get back to their young before their own digestive juices have broken down all the food. One male, tagged with a satellite transmitter, swam almost 110 miles in 24 hours.
The success of a breeding season has always been a matter of timing, and that is never truer than now. Adorable as the chicks are, I would do well not to get attached. A cold calculus is at work: in addition to the distance, there more than likely won’t be enough food to fledge two chicks. Parents must in effect choose which one is going to survive as both fight for every mouthful, jostling for position in a desperate jujitsu. But the biological imperative is clear: feed the larger chick. If the smaller chick is upset about this arrangement, shoulder it out of the way, nip it and swat it, and then ignore its cries until it slinks off to beg from another adult, one even less inclined to feed it.
The routine is difficult to watch, as chicks we’ve come to know—even though, really, they all look and act about the same—slowly weaken, whither away, and die.
“It’s hard, yes, but it’s the way things go,” Dee says at one point as we walk through the colony. “We forget, sometimes, how much death figures in with life. We’re too insulated from it. But you can’t stay insulated here, because the penguins won’t let you. They’re very unsentimental that way.”
Dee has clearly made her peace. I’m still working on mine.
Read Penguin Dispatch 6: The First Trip into the Ocean
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