When Greeks returned to New Zealand, he went hunting with Bartlett in Te Anau. ‘I met his sister, married her in 1967, and am still happily married today. We have just had a great three weeks at Rakaia fishing, with Roger joining us, so the friendship forged in that stormy environment has lasted as well as the hut obviously has.’
The hut was snug and warm and solid. Kerry Barton, as an old Antarctic hand, supervised the laying down of provisions, established radio contact, and got the stove working. We were a party of five. We drank tea at the dining table in front of the hut windows with a view of the beach, icebergs and grey sea. Penguins fished in the water and hitched rides on ice floes. Skuas performed dazzling swoops high in the air.
‘I have a surprise for you,’ Kerry said. She led our party out of the hut and along a walkway to the top of a mound. The scene below was outrageous: a colony of fifty thousand pairs of squawking, gargling, hooting, barking penguins sitting in their pink-hued excrement of krill in a valley formed by a glacier that stood in the sea. A colony of fifty thousand penguins makes a lot of noise. The constant din, the unbelievable numbers of birds – they were everywhere. The colony went for miles, along the beach and up the valleys, stuck there, flightless.
Soft, furry, gormless, the chicks had nearly fledged, and stood – or slept together face-down – in protective crèches. The protection was from the only bird of flight. The penguins had strength in numbers, but it was their only strength. South Polar skuas were their worst nightmare and they lived that nightmare every second. Closely related to gulls, skuas are monogamous, have a life expectancy of 35 years (one banded skua at another cape on the island has reached 40), and can fly vast distances: Scott saw a skua on his doomed expedition to the South Pole, making it the most southern bird in the world. In winter it migrates as far away as the North Atlantic, to feed and sleep entirely at sea. It’s large, with a lightly tan body, a sharp hooked black bill, and webbed feet that it uses to scoop up krill. In summer its other main source of food are penguins.
To walk through the valley of Adélie penguins was to walk through a valley of death. The ground was a boneyard: every step revealed another headless skeleton of an annihilated penguin, only its three-toed feet and flippers uneaten. This, surely, was Hell, preserved through the ages. For an updated version, I watched the final seven minutes of a penguin’s life. Two skua had succeeded in isolating it from the crèche and the adults. One skua planted a foot on the chick’s head and plucked out its feathers. The other bird ate it from behind. The chick beat at its assassins with its flippers, but it may have felt like just a gentle caress. On and on they ate it alive, and continued eating it when it finally, mercifully, stopped moving.
‘Cape Bird is about the best place anywhere in Antarctica to study penguins versus skuas,’ Euan Young said. Like Ray Greeks, Euan wrote to me after I returned from Antarctica; like Greeks he was familiar with the huts and the cape, where he worked as one of the world’s leading researchers of Adélie penguins. ‘As you saw, it is possible to sit above them and record their lives so perfectly with minimal disturbance.’
Yes. From one of his scientific papers: ‘Twenty-five hours’ observation of foraging skuas was carried out, in which 42 attacks on penguin chicks were recorded, and over 40 feedings observed. … Feeding was a desperately frantic business with the head and neck buried within the carcass to gobble up the soft internal flesh. … In some cases, skuas were drenched with blood over the forehead, neck and breast…’
As well as skuas vs. penguins, Young has observed skuas vs. skuas. ‘Siblicide is the major cause of chick mortality. … Very few survive more than ten days. … In five seasons at Cape Bird, monitoring approx. 250 pairs each year, only three pairs of chicks survived.’
I had stood for about 15 minutes watching the two skua eat the penguin chick. Feedings were going on all over the shop – in the centre of the colony and at the margins, skuas were attacking lone chicks, greasing their heads with young blood.
I kept watching. I watched in the days and I watched last thing at night. I was happy. It was here at last, on a beach beside a glacier, among fifty thousand pairs of penguins shitting pasty pinkish krill, among skuas getting on with the ‘frantic business’ of eating penguins alive, among New Zealanders who carried on the work performed by other New Zealanders for nearly 50 years, that I knew peace.
Apia
Neighbours
What happened on my first night in Samoa is that I got bitten by a wild dog, so next day I decided to call on the prime minister to ask what he was going to do about it.
The dog had been lean and swift, and had made a bad first impression, especially on my leg. My appointment with the dog had been sudden and short. I waited three hours to see Prime Minister Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegaoi. His office was on the top floor of the only tall structure in downtown Apia, but how to get inside the building? The glass doors at the front wouldn’t open. I angrily shook the handles and glared at a man sitting inside the lobby. He glared back and angrily shook his head. He shouted something I couldn’t hear through the glass. He walked slowly towards the doors and pointed at a handwritten piece of paper Sellotaped to the glass. It
