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Ready to Fledge
The biological urge is too strong to resist for penguin chicks as they fledge and dive into the water for the first time
Flapping Their Wings
As chicks mature, they strengthen their breast muscles by flapping their wings vigorously
It is a mid-January morning, and I am perched on an outcropping of rocks that overlooks the northern stretch of Punta Tombo. Below me, hundreds of Magellanic penguins begin their daily mass exodus, when adults leave their nests and come to the sea to forage or clean themselves, or simply to mill around on the shore in loose assemblage. They arrive in orderly lines, and along the miles of beach I can make out the colony’s major highways by the penguins spilling out of them. Dee calls this spectacle “the suits’ morning commute.” But the comings and goings of adults are not what I’m most interested in at the moment.
For two months now, we’ve watched the chicks grow. Most weigh five or six pounds or so. Their down has gone from a uniform gray to gray-and-white, and then the first sheen of midnight blue feathers began to show, and now they are sleek and handsome with nary a trace of down. Their flippers have lengthened and stiffened, and they’ve taken to standing outside their nests, flapping to build muscle. (Sometimes a chick will flap so vigorously that it falls over.) Clearly, they are getting ready to go somewhere. But when? No one knows exactly what it is that finally compels a chick to try its luck in the massive throbbing pulse of the ocean.
In 30-second samples, I count the adults as they pass through one of the nearby exits on their way to or from the sea: eight going down, three going back; 15 down, none back. I will do this for an hour. It is relaxing work, one of the few truly restful tasks of this entire field season. Every other day since January 10, someone has sat here, clicker in hand, counting adults and waiting for a fledgling. We haven’t seen any yet. Ten adults down, three back. Eighteen down, two back. Wait a few minutes until the next count. The mind starts to wander.
Then, a chick—so unexpected that my eye skips over it at first—totters down with the adults. But where they look somewhat jaded, the chick is wild-eyed, as if baffled by its own daring. It scurries to the beach through a gauntlet of mature birds, dodging frantically whenever one snaps at it, which happens a lot. At last, looking harried, it reaches the water’s edge. Here, it stops. Waves beat on the shore, rushing up the pebbly beach and withdrawing with a caressing hiss.
The chick seems to have lost its nerve. It takes a tentative step, a wave hits, it scrambles back, the wave reaches for it, can’t quite get it, retreats hissing. The chick looks relieved, but the next wave is larger, travels farther up the slope and upends the chick. Unable to get away, the chick turns, drops its head and rushes to meet the sea, plunging under the crest of the next wave. There is a frothy jumble—roiling foam, a flipper flinging through the air—before the chick pops up like a cork in the calm just beyond the surf. It looks terrified and exhilarated as, for the first time, it feels the medium in which it will spend almost all of its life. It takes a few hesitant strokes, and for some reason reminds me of a tiny toy in a giant bathtub. But almost immediately it becomes aware of a natural and effortless and hitherto untested competence. It swims farther out, more sure of itself now, past the scrum of adults near land. Soon it is a small dark silhouette just visible in an endless plane of blue that sparkles with the fire of the spreading day. Then it dives under the water, flicks its wings, and disappears into the open ocean.
Read Penguin Dispatch 7: Turbo, the Penguin Who Loved Humans
Comments
Beautifully written. I felt like I was there!
Posted by Kimberly on June 10,2009 | 09:42AM