A superlative penquin: the least known, last studied, strangest penguin takes a scientist on a most uncomfortable journey

Natural History, Nov, 2001 by Lloyd Spencer Davis

The Antipodes Islands are in the middle of nowhere. More precisely, they are three and a half days of vomiting southeast of my home in Dunedin, New Zealand. I am the sort of person who gets motion sickness on escalators, and as I lay strapped into my bunk on the Breaksea Girl, I asked myself over and over, "Why am I doing this?"

The answer was penguins. Of the world's sixteen species, all have been studied in detail except one. I was after the last, the erect-crested penguin. This penguin owes its anonymity more to its location than to any lack of cuteness or scientific interest. Erect-crested penguins breed on the Antipodes and on a similarly isolated group of islands nearly 200 miles to the north, the Bounty Islands. Both are home to little more than seabirds, seals, and shipwrecks.

Erect-crested penguins are, quite simply, the most striking of penguins. Upright parallel combs of blonde feathers sit incongruously above their eyes, like Marilyn Monroe's eyebrows on steroids, lending the penguins a feminine beauty. But what drew me most to these birds was that they were rumored to exhibit an extremely bizarre behavior. There had been only two prior attempts to study these penguins scientifically--one conducted about thirty years ago, late in the breeding season, and a more recent one lasting a mere five days, during the period of egg laying. The authors of this last study asserted, remarkably, that these penguins, which lay two eggs, deliberately eject the first egg from the nest soon after it is laid.

It was another twist to one of the stranger stories in the animal kingdom. The erect-crested penguin is one of five species known as crested penguins. All five lay two eggs but rear only one chick. Furthermore, in contrast to all other birds, they lay a second egg that is larger than the first, and it is the chick from the second egg that is most likely to survive. Biologists have long sought the answers to two questions: Why produce two eggs if only one chick can survive? Why is the second egg larger? I was, I told myself with each roll of the boat, in search of answers to such questions as much as I was after the "last" penguin.

Late during the fourth night I heard the anchor being let out, and mercifully, the wild pitching eased. I went up on deck to get my first glimpse of the place my two companions and I would be calling home for the next two months. In the morning gloom, I peered straight out at the 600-foot-high cliff aptly named Perpendicular Head. At its base, huge waves crashed relentlessly. I had never seen a place less likely to offer sanctuary, less likely to be called home.

Fortunately, not all the cliffs that surrounded the island were as high as this, but unfortunately, in the small cove that offered the only reasonable landing site, the waves were as fierce as those that pummeled Perpendicular Head. Despite the apparent proximity of the penguins, which I could make out as groups of dots at the base of the cliffs, at that instant they seemed very far away.

We had no alternative but to choose a much less desirable landing site, at Stella Bay. To call our approach a landing is really to glorify it; it was much. more like a controlled crash. Wearing wet suits, Martin Renner (a former student of mine), Dave Houston (a biologist from New Zealand's Department of Conservation), and I jumped from a dinghy into the freezing water. A wave immediately slammed us into the rocks, cutting open my knee. We grasped kelp to anchor us, so as not to be taken out in the backwash, and clambered over its slimy fronds to the jumble of boulders that constituted the beach. We then had to wade back in and retrieve repeated dinghy-loads of gear that were tossed to us between one wave and the next: packs of clothes, boxes of food, drums of fuel, generators, scientific equipment, and wood for mending a hut constructed on the island about a century earlier to shelter castaways. By the time we had finished, we were all cut and bruised. After tossing us a box of sandwiches, the captain of the Breaksea Girl waved good-bye and steamed off to the northwest, leaving the three of us--the entire human population of the Antipodes Islands--in an enveloping drizzle.

Next we had to get our gear up a 70-foot-high cliff; carry it through waist-high tussock grass, which is just about impossible to walk through without falling over every few steps; and, finally, wade through a bog. It took us two full days of backbreaking work to lug all our supplies up to the hut.

While completing this task, we were able to make our first casual observations of the penguins. Stella Bay is home to a colony of about 300 breeding pairs. At this stage, however, virtually all those present were single males, which typically arrive at the colony a week or more before the females. Why they should do so is not at all clear; it's not as if they have a swag of boxes and generators to hoist up to their nest sites before getting down to the business of courtship. The classic explanation is that they come early to secure a site before the females get there, but other penguins manage this without the need for the males to arrive so far ahead of the females. It is said that the males use this period to fight like gladiators for nest space, with the victors presumably getting the choicest sites. But we saw little evidence of this; there was hardly any fighting at all.