FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE SHIPWRECK
Punta Tombo, Argentina
It amazes me how quickly my first week in Punta Tombo has turned into a month. It’s already mid-November, springtime in Argentina, and in three weeks I’ll travel home to complete the third year of my Ph.D. program in conservation biology.
In only my second season at Punta Tombo, I feel like a regular as I continue laying down stakes and surveying penguins at the largest Magellanic colony in the world. This time, I’ve also graduated from the trailer next to the researchers’ house to a bunk inside with five other graduate students. Things are otherwise the same—the long journey, the once-a-week showers, the meals of instant soup. While I enjoy being among fellow researchers—late-night talks over glasses of Malbec, shared discoveries in this brand-new world—I also miss the trailer, with the rattle of never-ending wind and the brays of the resident penguin underneath, still waiting for his mate to show up.
Last season, my second year of graduate school and my first visit here, was the first time I’d ever seen a penguin. The pingüino, as the locals call him, was on the dirt road near the researchers’ building. By then I’d read a lot about the seventeen species of penguins, but nothing compared to seeing the little black-and-white body crossing the road a few yards away. I could see his Magellanic characteristics—black with a white belly, a band of white that starts above each eye and goes all the way around the head, meeting under the chin. Another band of black surrounding the belly in a U shape. A black bill and a bit of pink skin around the eyes. He walked past in the dusk, with a penguin’s usual sense of purpose—his head held high and his flippers out—and he paid little attention to us, a carful of jet-lagged scientists, as he disappeared from the road into the drab landscape, amid the tawny dirt and the bushes of myriad shades of green.
Most of the penguins here are accustomed to people and commotion. The land on which this colony resides had been donated by a local family to the province of Chubut for preservation—but also for tourism. In addition to the family’s estancia—their private ranch—and the researchers’ quarters, the penguins live amid a tourist center with a shop and restaurant, as well as public bathrooms and a parking lot.
The researchers’ house comes alive shortly after dawn—coffee brewing, doors opening and closing, cereal spoons clinking against the sides of bowls. I wear tan cargo pants and three layers of brown and green shirts; the government requires us to blend in with the colors of the land. I also strap on kneepads because we spend much of our time kneeling, peering into bushes and burrows as we count the birds. I tuck a water bottle and granola bar into my day pack, and I head out with Christina, the postdoc I’m teamed up with. We trek among the penguins, sheep, guanacos, and European hares, their shadows long in the early-morning light.
I’m carrying the gancho—a long piece of rebar with a hook at the end—which we guide gently under the penguins’ breasts, lifting them slightly off the ground, peeking beneath to see if they’re incubating eggs. When we find an active nest with a banded bird, we use the hook to draw him or her out of the nest.
When I discover a banded female in a burrow, I wish we could leave her alone. The penguin is huddled in the nest with her partner, and when they see me peering in, they tilt their heads first one way and then the other, almost all the way around, back and forth in a constant, anxious motion. I lean in far enough to read the numbers on the band, then call out the digits to Christina, who checks the log. As it turns out, it’s been five years since we’ve seen this penguin, so we’ll need to check her out. I let Christina draw her from the nest with the gancho, then I slide the straps of the handheld scale around the bird and hold the scale up and away from my body. Christina jots down the bird’s weight, four kilos, in our notebook, then reaches over and takes the scale from my hands. “I’ll lower her down,” she says, “if you can hold her?”
I hold the penguin firmly by her neck, gripping her between my knees. With my fingerless gloves I can feel her soft, dense feathers, and I cover her eyes with my half-gloved hand to soothe her as Christina measures the bill’s length and width and then the feet, reading aloud the numbers on the caliper as she writes them in her notebook. When she’s done, I turn the penguin toward the nest and let her go; she scrambles back into her burrow, and I breathe a quiet sigh of relief.
We continue working the colony under a cloud-studded, teal-blue sky, among the dust and scrubby bushes—the lycium and uña de gato, the jume and molle, and the quilembai. We pass a penguin pair napping just outside their nest, lying together belly down, the female’s bill resting on her mate’s back. A mile or so farther on, we see a dead penguin, a male, lying amid small pebbles and short, bright green grass just a few feet from his nest, a burrow under a quilembai bush.