I was not expecting today to be the day that a couple of giant emperor penguins would make me cry, but here we are. This incredibly intimate footage was captured as part of the 2013 BBC documentary, Penguins: Spy in the Huddle,
shot over the course of a year by 50 spycams shaped like stones, eggs,
and other penguins. It's not clear how the chick died, but that tiny
frigid corpse is enough to kick anyone right in the feels, and then you
have deal with the reaction of its mother.
Hunched over the perfectly preserved chick, the mother pokes gently
at it with her beak to check for signs of life. Instinctively, she
nudges it towards her pouch because it's all she has to offer, but it's
far too late.
In perhaps the most heartbreaking moment of the footage, a female
companion trundles over and rests her head on the shoulder of the
crumpled mother. It's not right to anthropomorphise and project emotions
onto these animals that we don't know are even there, but it's pretty
surreal how the scene could just as easily be two humans mourning a
child.
The mother nudges the chick closer between her feet before
throwing her head back and bleating into the air and her companion does
the same. "The mother invested everything into her chick, to lose it is a
tragedy," says narrator and British actor, David Tennant. "She will have to wait another year."
Emperor penguin females lay just one egg each during the
Antarctic winter months, and once that's done, they will leave the
inland colony and make the 50- to 200-km walk
back to the ocean to feed and recuperate. The males remain to incubate
their eggs. Before then, the couple must take great pains to ensure that
when they transfer their egg from brood pouch to brood pouch, they
don't drop it on the ice and kill the embryo - many Emperor penguins
lose their chicks by messing up the handover.
For almost four months, the males will remain huddled together,
their eggs kept warm by the flesh of the brooch pouch and propped up on
their feet - they're the only species in the world known to care for
their young like this. For up to 115 consecutive days,
the males will stand, still as statues, eating nothing but a little
snow as they wait for their mates to return from the sea. They'll often lose 40 percent of their body weight in the process.
The females will return just after their chicks have hatched, and
then they have to figure out where their family is in the throng by
calling out to their mates. Then it's up to each couple to ensure that
what happened to the poor little chick above doesn't happen to their
offspring.
The Penguin Camera is located on Torgersen Island (64°46’S, 64°04’W), off the coast of Anvers Island and less than a mile from Palmer Station. Torgersen Island is home to a colony of Adélie penguins numbering approximately 2,500. This camera is seasonal and operates primarily from October to February, the Adélie breeding season. The camera is solar-powered and may sometimes experience brief outages due to inclement weather. School classrooms and other educational demonstrations will often take control of the camera, moving it to gain better views of the colony.
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