I braced against the wind in the middle of a chinstrap penguin colony blanketing a rocky ridge. All around me penguins waddled through the colony or sat incubating their eggs on nests built from pebbles. The birds squabbled and crooned to one another. Some were in ecstatic display, flippers flung out from their bodies, heads pointing straight up, chests rising and falling in time with their screeching calls. The sound came from all directions and the noise was deafening. Penguin colonies are an assault on the senses: a cacophony of calls, a pungent fishy odor, and the penguins’ short black-and-white bodies always in movement.
It was time for the annual nest census, which I was conducting with my coworker Matt. We tiptoed through the fray, laying bright ropes down between the nests to section them into countable pieces. Sitting on eggs, the penguins reached over to investigate the rope with their bills, tugging it and shaking it.
By the time we finished, the ropes were brown and muddy with the thick penguin muck ubiquitous across all the colonies. We tried to discern the ropes’ shape from uncontaminated patches of color and count the nests on a rusty tally-whacker, a metal yo-yo-size counter that kept track of the numbers every time my finger pressed a rusty button.
A passing penguin mounted my boot and directed a flurry of flipper slaps at my calf, squawking its displeasure with characteristic chinstrap belligerence. If I’d looked down to nudge him off, I would have lost my concentration and had to count the section of nests again, so I let him go ahead and slap me. The sting kick-started my blood flow and pumped warmth to my increasingly numb feet. (...)
The nearest US base in Antarctica was some two hundred miles away. We had been dropped off by a ship two months ago, with all our gear and food, and would be picked up in three more. Our crew of five was the only human presence on this isolated promontory.
Our home was a one-room plywood hut that served as a living room, kitchen, office, and bedroom. We had no internet, no running water, limited electricity. We worked every single day, in all weather: snow, wind, rain, blizzards, gales, hail, sun. Christmas, New Year’s, Halloween, weekends, full moon, new moon. We measured and counted, captured and released, tracked and took notes. My job, in essence, was to observe. (...)
Every figure about antarctic marine species is the result of an enormous output of time and labor. For every single dot on a graph scientists present to clean-cut diplomats and policy makers, there is a grimy field-worker like me, stationed on an isolated island, surrounded by penguins, covered in penguin muck and smelling like fermented shrimp, writing down metrics and surveys in an equally grimy field notebook.
For every long-term population trend reported in a journal article there are decades of field biologists standing in wind and snow, monitoring penguins or seals, hitting tally-whackers with numb fingers, far from family and friends and anything resembling human civilization. Our lives are tied to the weather, the season, and the wildlife itself.
It’s not glamorous work. You’re dropped on this frigid island with four other people and no privacy. Your body is buffeted by the elements, your mind strains under the work’s demands, your heart is rubbed raw with beauty. You live among wild things in a wild place, stand on a stark island facing your own stark nature. There are no shops, no roads, no TVs, no trails, no distractions from the machinations of your own mind. Just a handful of lonely shelters, your crew, the wind, the rocks, and the penguins.
Yet, it is a joy to work at Cape Shirreff, for reasons that, to field biologists, seem self-evident. But personal fulfillment does not fund research. It is the curse of a biologist to justify the existence of their study species to the world. Beneath the grant proposals, paper introductions, and presentations must lie proof that the species under scientific scrutiny have immediate value to our society.
by Naira de Gracia, LitHub | Read more:
Image: Scribner
[ed. A good description of field work everywhere in the world.]
