Among Penguins: A Bird Man in Antarctica

37. Heat Wave

183 37. Heat Wave eee January arrived with the warmest days we’d seen all season. For a few hours each afternoon, temperatures exceeded freezing, and the relative heat, at least at first, proved a nice change from bone-chilling lows of early summer. When the sun shone, the place seemed positively tropical. I stripped to two layers of fleece while working in the penguin colony, no longer preoccupied with staying warm. Hiking back up to the hut at the end of each day became a hot ordeal. One day, I removed all top layers before beginning the commute. Even with my pack cinched over a barechested torso, perspiration dripped. Kirsten lifted an eyebrow as I arrived. “Lose your shirt somewhere?” she inquired. “Just trying to stay cool,” I said, out of breath. “The snow surface is becoming seriously irritating to walk on. It’s got an icy crust layered over four inches of slush, half-melted by the sun, and you slide six inches on every step. Making progress is hard. Took me almost twice as long to cover the same distance.” “Yeah, I noticed that,” Kirsten said. “The ice is melting everywhere.” My boots were soaking wet. “It’s making rivers just beneath the surface,” I complained. “Sometimes, when you break through the crust, your foot hits a pocket of icy water underneath. Hope my boots dry out by tomorrow morning.” We hadn’t had a storm in weeks. Each day dawned bright and sunny with calm winds, blue skies, and Mediterranean-like climate. On some afternoons, highs reached a sweltering forty degrees Fahrenheit. The heat wave brought a host of unanticipated problems. Our frozen dinners, meat stores, dead penguin specimens, and human waste buckets thawed out, stinking up the hut. Ice 184 Noah Strycker trapped inside the roof panels gradually melted, and soon every available container was deployed indoors to catch constant drips. Kirsten, in the wettest corner, worked out a complicated system of gutters and driplines to defend her bunk space from indoor precipitation. My tent, positioned outside on top of a thick snow bank, gradually sank into a five-inch-deep lake that refroze each night while I slept, setting around my sleeping pad like concrete. On my final two days at Crozier, it would take eight hours to free the tent’s floor cloth from this icy foundation using an ice axe and boiling water. The penguin colony also thawed out. “Things are going to get messy,” Michelle had earlier prophesied, and I now realized what she’d meant. Snow fields on high slopes of the penguin valley issued streams of runoff that merged into a river cascading toward the beach. As it flowed through the penguin colony, the meltwater picked up heavy loads of guano, pieces of carcasses, and orange silt. The slopes seemed to drip with open, running sewers. Everywhere was dirt, filth, excrement, and barf. Skuas picked off penguin chicks at an alarming rate, and became so overfed that they only ate the stomach contents out of each one, letting the rest of the carcass sink into half-frozen mud. Dead, gutted bodies accumulated and squelched underfoot. As temperatures rose, pungent smells in the colony became overpowering. Along the beachfront, pack ice had finally dispersed enough to let some swell through, all the way from the tropical Pacific. Waves pounded a pebbled, sandy strip beneath a fantastic abutment of icicles accumulated by freezing spray. Penguins navigated these formations to dive into the still-chilly seawater, timing their moves with the waves. Mud and flooding became serious problems in the penguin colony. Melting rivers of guano swallowed up nests that hadn’t been built on high ground, and penguin chicks falling into the icy water risked hypothermia. Sopping wet baby penguins, coated in mud and filth, would huddle, shivering uncontrollably until they died. 185 Heat Wave In some places, accumulations of guano-enriched mud turned to slippery quicksand. I put my foot into several of these sumps, sometimes sinking up to my knee in thick, sandy ooze before pulling loose with a loud sucking effect. Adult penguins seemed to hate the heat. They lay visibly panting in the sun with open beaks and fluttering throats, like huskies lounging on a hot summer day. I felt sorry for captive penguins in zoos back home. If these birds were uncomfortable in forty-degree weather, what would they think of seventy degrees? I...