Early in the breeding season of 2005, a young penguin was very forcibly evicted from his nest by a stronger male—hardly a rare event at Punta Tombo. Perhaps to compensate for his perceived shortcomings, the young penguin moved under the Penguin Project’s enormous truck, a Ford F150 Turbo. There was a certain logic to this. The truck provided ample shade and its undercarriage was nice and snug. It was a good nest covering, save for its occasional tendency to drive away; that a penguin should choose to live beneath it was not worth more than a humorous aside. But then he took to visiting the researchers’ living quarters. He was not at all averse to human contact, and was given a band and a name: Turbo.

Turbo stayed under the truck for the rest of the year, but for whatever reason was unable to entice a female to join him, so he moved on. This season he had a fine nest deep in the center of a molle bush near the house, surrounded by coils of discarded barbed wire. He still considered the researchers’ house his second home, though, and would call on us nightly, rapping on the door with his bill until we opened it. Then he would parade in, clucking, and someone would stick out an arm or a foot for him to flipper-pat. (Flipper-patting is a precursor to copulation. Basically, Turbo tries to mate with us.) Once he had spent his affections, he would doze under the table and keep a sleepy eye on us while we went about our business. After some interval he would decide he’d had enough of our company and stand by the door until we let him out. But he never simply left. He liked someone to walk him to his nest, and he would wait patiently on the doorstep until we obliged him. Then, checking to make sure he was accompanied, he would toddle home.

Surrounded all year as we were by sameness, Turbo was a sort of balm. If ecology is the study of how organisms interact with each other and their environment, then it is by extension a search for patterns. It requires the smoothing of difference. During the season, whenever we would exclaim over some extraordinary measurement—an unusually large egg, or a chick with giant feet—Dee would say, “That’s interesting. But we’ll kill it with data.” By this she meant that we would gather so much data that, if a broader pattern existed, it was bound to emerge from the thousands of data points, which would overwhelm whatever effects a few oddballs might have.

Turbo singularly resisted such negation. He was by far the most affecting outlier I saw, or may ever see. Half a million penguins breed at Punta Tombo—or try to, at any rate—and 499,999 of them may have feared us, fled from us, or beaten us with their flippers, but he would run out of his bush to greet us when we came back from the field. He loved us, or so we told ourselves in fits of unrestrained anthropomorphism.

He was also a useful antidote against a certain strain of biological romanticism. Sometimes, as I watched the penguins enact their broader patterns, I would catch myself indulging the feeling that I was seeing one of Earth’s ageless phenomena, that the penguins have been and will be at Punta Tombo forever. But this is not true. The colony itself is barely one hundred years old: penguins first came in the late 1800s; there is a picture from 1912, I think, that shows the colony’s entire population of 12 birds or so. Now, even as this one shrinks, others are growing. The one at San Lorenzo, where Dee and Popi clicked their counters in December, had around 2,000 breeding pairs in 1993. According to the latest census, it has over 100,000. No one is sure exactly where these birds are coming from, but a shift of some sort is clearly in progress, perhaps as penguins follow their food. And Dee is concerned: the penguins at Punta Tombo are on public land, where protections are formalized if not rigorously enforced, but some of the expanding colonies aren’t. How those penguins will fare as they shuttle up and down the Atlantic coast is one of many pressing questions.

All over the world, penguins face a similarly uncertain future. Of 17 species, 10 are vulnerable to extinction, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. As Dee noted in a 2008 analysis published in BioScience, a number of forces threaten to “make penguin life more difficult.” Coastal development encroaches on breeding sites; oil pollution continues to be a problem; climate variation causes the distribution of prey species to shift, while potentially reducing ocean productivity in places. The consequent population declines, she writes, reflect these rapid changes to the marine environment, some of which are human-wrought.

Near Punta Tombo, versions of these forces are already at work. In 2003, the Argentine government approved the Province of Chubut’s plans to establish an anchovy fishery off the Patagonian coast. Mention was made in the plans of the proximity of wildlife to the proposed fishery, but no means were given for evaluating the fishery’s impact on that wildlife. In 2004 and 2005, the catch from that fishery exceeded 30,000 tons. And the fishing continues; sometimes at night, the horizon glowed orange with the lights of the fleet as it plied the waters of the Atlantic.

The penguins must also weather, oddly, an excess of affection from all the people who want to see them. The provincial and national governments know they have a tremendous tourist attraction at hand, and after years of what they consider underutilization, they are trying to make the most of it. When we arrived in Argentina in September, we couldn’t come to the colony right away because Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the President of Argentina, was visiting for the day. (Popi, who was there, managed to slip her a Penguin Project hat, which she was photographed wearing.) Cristina, as she is known, spoke of Punta Tombo as a natural heritage and encouraged Argentines to come. And they have, in force, along with international visitors. In its first years of existence, barely 5,000 people visited Punta Tombo. Last year, over 100,000 tourists came.

Set against the hundreds of thousands of penguins that I walked past every day, all of these forces and concerns and statistics were sometimes dulled into abstraction. But then I would think of Turbo sitting in his bush, obliviously earnest in his penguin-ness, surrounded by circlets of barbed wire. I would next imagine him going to sea and navigating his way through a labyrinth of fishnets, swimming hundreds of miles and finding nothing to eat, and then coming home and on his way to his nest getting run over by a tour bus. Then the threats were all too real and immediate.

As well they should be. “Penguins are marine sentinels,” Dee said throughout the season. This is her refrain. She’ll say it in English or Spanish to anyone within earshot. I suppose she’d mime it if it came to that. “They’re telling us about the ocean, their environment, which is also our environment. It’s up to us to listen to them.”

So I continue to worry about Turbo, whose fate is my own. And he, in his way, keeps an eye on me, as he toddles to the edge of the sidewalk, and then stops to check and see if I’m still there with him. As if to say, “Come. Let us go together.”

Read Penguin Dispatch 1: Arriving in Punta Tombo, Argentina