My Last Continent: A Novel(56)
We continue working the colony under a cloud-studded, teal-blue sky, among the dust and scrubby bushes—the -lycium and u?a 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.
I look over toward the burrow. The penguin’s mate is sitting at the opening of the nest, her eyes on her mate’s body. I don’t see any eggs, so they’d just coupled up. Eventually she’ll have to leave, returning next season to try again. Magellanics are remarkably loyal to their nest sites—even if a nest is compromised, a bird won’t abandon it. We’ve seen nests trampled by tourists; the penguins rebuild. We’ve seen burrows collapse after heavy rains; the penguins dig themselves out. We’ve seen birds scurry toward their nests as tourists crowd around them to take photographs; we’ve seen them try to cross the road to their nests as cars fly past. Sometimes they make it; sometimes they don’t.
And this is what Christina and I encounter when we make our way back to the research and tourist center—a penguin lying in the road, a tour bus just ahead, its driver talking animatedly in Spanish. My Spanish is limited, but it’s clear what happened: The penguin was trying to return to her nest, and she got hit. I kneel down next to the bird. I notice the tag on her left wing, and I pull a small pair of pliers from my cargo pants and pry it off. Later, when I look her up, I’ll learn that she’s fifteen years old, that we’ve been following her for a decade, that she’s raised nine generations of chicks on our watch. I’ll make the last recording about this bird in our field notes; I’ll write her death certificate.
I look around until I find what I think must be her nest—inside is a single male, lying on two eggs. They may hatch if he doesn’t abandon them, but even if they do, the chicks won’t survive.
After dinner that night, I head out for a walk. The sun is setting, the evening sky turning violet. A thin, watery stripe of blue brushes the landscape where sky meets water, and the low, rolling hills are bathed in lavender light. I head up a slope from which I can see the ocean, and the brays of the penguins shatter the silence.
In the distance I see the lights of a fishing boat, a boat that no doubt will dump oil-laced ballast and catch penguins in its nets. The colony here has declined nearly 20 percent in the last decade, and we’re killing them in big ways and small—by the thousands and one by one—their predators no longer fellow creatures or acts of nature but those at the helms of boats and buses.
Back at the station, I slip into the supply room and find a tent. Gathering my sleeping bag under one arm and using my flashlight to avoid stepping too close to the penguin burrows, I venture past the lights of the house, over a small hill, and down into a hollow, walking until everything ceases to exist but me and the penguins. I fall asleep with the wind shaking the tent, and I wake to the serenade of penguins reuniting nearby—sounds of love and hope and optimism, spoken in a language that science will never be able to decipher, yet one I feel as though I can understand.
ONCE EVERY FEW weeks, a small group makes the two-hour journey to Trelew for supplies, and my turn comes up for the next run. As we traverse the dirt road, I look out the window and think of what I’ve decided—how, by giving up on my Ph.D., I’m leaving the birds with one fewer scientist to help save them.
Yet I can’t ignore the nagging feeling that geographically I’ve only gotten halfway to where I really want to be. And I know that I can be easily replaced, that I can find work elsewhere, that penguins everywhere need saving.
Months earlier, back home in Seattle, I’d heard about an organization called the Antarctic Penguins Project; only a few years old, it had just gotten some serious funding, and its mission had piqued my interest—the organization collaborates with naturalists from all over the world, with all different backgrounds. Their researchers don’t all have doctorates, aren’t all affiliated with universities. It seemed like a place that might be a good fit for the rogue scientist I was on the verge of becoming.
Once in town, I arrange to meet the group later, then duck into a farmacia to buy a few things and find a phone. I use my credit card to place a call to the States. When a harried female voice barks out, “Antarctic Penguins Project,” I introduce myself.
IT’S MY LAST week at Tombo, and as eager as I am to make my way down to the Antarctic, I’m finding it hard to say good-bye to these birds, who have taught me so much.
The day before I leave for Trelew to begin the journey back, I walk to the tip of the peninsula, out past the research station and tourist center, over sand dunes studded with tufts of pampas grass. I stop at the spot where the point extends into the sea, a bridge of lava and tide pools, light-green water breaking against black rock, penguins floating in whitewash and coming ashore on a curve of black sand.
As I watch where penguins leap from the surf, I think of the bag we have back at the research station—a canvas sack filled with penguin tags sent to us by fishing boats—the tags of all the penguins that died in their nets, or birds they found dead in the water or on shore. I touch the tag in my pocket, the one I took off the bird who was killed on the road, one of so many.
Finally I turn away from the water, from the waves rattling with yet-undiscovered penguin tags, and head toward the station, resisting the urge to look back.