Among Penguins: A Bird Man in Antarctica

31. Thanksgiving

157 31. Thanksgiving eee “Happy Turkey Day!” I beamed to Kirsten and Michelle as we huddled next to a large subcolony of penguins. “Yeah, I almost forgot,” Kirsten said. “Turkeys are kind of a foreign concept.” “Me, too,” admitted Michelle. “It’s hard to remember the holidays when they don’t mean much,” I agreed. On Thanksgiving Day, we were in the midst of a censusing project. Two days before, a helicopter had flown over the colony to take aerial photos. Eventually, some poor soul in a university office would painstakingly count every single speck on those images, each dot representing a penguin, to get an accurate population estimate—somewhere around three hundred thousand birds. Still, the photographs were just a good index. To groundtruth the aerial census, our Crozier crew performed actual counts of selected subcolonies. So on Thanksgiving Day Kirsten, Michelle, and I worked our way around the valley together, clutching handheld mechanical counters while visually sifting through thousands of penguins. After finishing each subcolony, we compared our totals. If the numbers were too different, we counted twice. “I got one thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven penguins for that one,” I said. Michelle wrote the number in her field notebook and turned expectantly to Kirsten. “One thousand, three hundred and eightynine ,” she said, evenly. “Dang,” Michelle replied. “I got one thousand, three hundred and twelve. Too far off. We’ll have to count this one again.” We spread out in resignation along the edge of the subcolony, reset our counters to zero, and began afresh. I started at one end 158 Noah Strycker of the meandering concentration of penguin nests, letting my eyes flick quickly from one bird to the next. It was easiest to construct abstract shapes inside large groups, running visually along mental rows. For each additional penguin, my thumb hit the counter trigger, turning over a new digit. It was good to be outside. The previous twenty-four hours had been stressful, busy, and cramped. Three techs had been flown from McMurdo Station to fix our satellite Internet and electrical systems the preceding afternoon. They succeeded, but, by the time things were working again, weather had clamped an icy fist over Crozier. Fifty-mile-per-hour winds whipped up a partial whiteout, preventing the helicopter from retrieving our visitors. In an anxious moment, the helo pilot hovered his craft outside our hut’s window, buffeted sideways by wind gusts, while apologizing to us over the radio. “I can’t shoot the approach, guys,” he said. “I’m heading back to station.” With that, the machine turned, lifted, and disappeared behind a curtain of rotor-driven snow, beginning a solitary forty-five-mile retreat to McMurdo. The three guys hadn’t expected to be trapped at our field camp on Thanksgiving Eve and had brought only enough supplies for a day trip. In our enforced captivity, I cooked everyone dinner and played music on a laptop while Kirsten and Michelle tidied up to accommodate our guests. We fitted them with emergency sleeping bags, but the hut was cramped with six people, and there weren’t enough bunks to go around, since Michelle, Kirsten, and I were also forced to sleep indoors. Two good-natured communications techs slept on the narrow floor. The blizzard, though strong enough to pin us indoors, wasn’t a big one, and blew itself out overnight. On Thanksgiving morning, fitful gusts tickled our camp, but a helicopter could settle long enough to evacuate the McMurdo guys, who were relieved to leave in time for a real dinner at the American station. Kirsten, Michelle, and I waved goodbye as the mechanical bird twirled away, and admired a special holiday present delivered by its pilot: one semi-fresh onion wrapped in a brown paper bag. We suited 159 Thanksgiving up for our ground counts in the penguin colony, happy to be alone again. On the second pass, our totals aligned much better. “One thousand, four hundred and two,” I said, counter in hand. “One thousand, three hundred and eighty-four,” said Kirsten. “Great!” breathed Michelle. “I got one thousand, three hundred and ninety-six. That’s as good as it gets.” We moved on to the next target, using a map to navigate to specific subcolonies. After several hours, we had each counted nearly ten thousand individual penguins, many of them multiple times, providing a solid baseline for the aerial census...