Penguin Dispatch 2: The Scientists of Punta Tombo
For over 25 years, researcher Dee Boersma has been coming with students in tow to Punta Tombo to study the penguins
- By Eric Wagner
- Smithsonian.com, June 04, 2009, Subscribe
Dee Boersma is sweeping the desert. This might seem a thankless task at first, to sweep sand in a desert. Dee, though, has just installed a small scale along a major penguin highway. She hopes it will help her find out how much the birds weigh both before and after their foraging trips. (“Much easier than chasing them all down and weighing them individually,” she says.) But the scale is dainty. Sand piles up and distorts measurements, while wreaking havoc on the scale’s delicate innards. So Dee sweeps.
“What’s so funny?” she asks tartly, as four members of her field crew watch her diligently if futilely swipe at the scale, which the wind is already re-burying. She flails away. Sand swirls around her.
Dee has been coming to Punta Tombo for more than 25 years. In 1982, the Argentine government and the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society, or WCS) asked if she would take a census of the colony. A Japanese company had asked the Chubut provincial government if it could harvest 40,000 penguins a year for their meat, oil and skin (to make golf gloves). When Dee came and saw the place, she initially didn’t intend to do much other than to determine whether the proposed harvest would be sustainable. (She found it would not.) But over the course of this initial study, she also realized just how little was understood about the penguins. How long did they live? More than that, how did they live? The colony had been a provincial reserve officially since 1979, but not much was known of its residents other than that they were there. Dee decided to keep studying, and she has returned every year since as head of the WCS Penguins Project.
Early in her research, one of Dee’s biggest concerns was oiled penguins. Each year, hundreds of birds washed up on Argentine beaches covered in black slime, dying if not already dead. From the 1980s until 1994, Dee estimates that more than 40,000 penguins died each year because of oil, which destroyed their feathers' insulating qualities. The problem turned out to be the shipping lanes. After attaching satellite transmitters to migrating penguins, Dee found that, as the birds swam north to Brazil and Uruguay to spend the winter, their routes closely followed those of the ships. Ships would illegally void their ballast tanks at sea, and thousands of penguins swam through the slicks.
“Large oil spills would get all the press,” Dee says now. “But often the much bigger problems are the chronic polluters, which can cause a lot more damage.” She brought this finding to the attention of the Argentine government. That and pressure from the general public, which has repeatedly taken to the streets to protest on behalf of penguins, compelled the government to move the shipping lanes 24 miles farther out to sea. The number of oiled penguins on beaches dropped almost to zero.
“It was a great example of science leading to a tangible, useful result,” Dee says.
Whatever influence she exerts over governments and tankers, though, pales in comparison to the sway she has had (and continues to have) over the scores of American and Argentine students she has trained over the years, whom she calls her “chickies.” Pablo (Popi) Garcia-Borboroglu, one such chicky, is now a researcher with National Research Council Argentina. He made the mistake of dropping by one October afternoon to say hello. Every October, as Popi should have known, Dee leads a survey that entails going to each of 64 stakes scattered throughout the colony and tallying the penguins around each one, as well as the active nests, inactive nests, and so on. It is a vital if time-consuming exercise that happened to be scheduled for that afternoon, and unfortunately for Popi, Dee was feeling shorthanded. After lunch and the usual pleasantries, I washed dishes and pretended not to listen to the most virtuosic press-ganging I’ve ever heard:
Dee: Could you stay and help with the survey?
Popi: I don’t know. How late will it go?
Dee: How late can you stay?
Popi: I was going to leave at 2:30.
Dee: Could you stay later?
Popi: Maybe until 3:30. (Plaintively) My wife and children.
Dee: We could be finished by five.
Popi: Really? My wife will be mad.
Dee: Six.
[A resigned silence]
Popi: Will you be doing South Beach? [NB: South Beach is very pretty.]
Dee: Yes. [NB: Among many other places.]
Popi: I don’t—
Dee: Great. We’ll be finished by seven. At the latest. We’ll have you out of here by dark.
Popi left that evening at 8:00. He exacted a small measure of payback, though. Would Dee mind coming to San Lorenzo, a colony on Peninsula Valdes, to look for penguins with flipper bands? (Although Dee and her colleagues have banded thousands of penguins, they are so highly likely to return to the place of their birth—Punta Tombo—that the chance of finding them anywhere else is the remotest of theoretical possibilities. But the possibility itself is what matters.) And so, over two days, Popi, Dee, and a few others counted close to 20,000 birds. They found two bands. They were ecstatic. This was Popi’s revenge.
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