But down by the water’s edge adelie penguins are jumping ashore
clean, wet, and plump from the icy Southern Ocean, cute enough to
grace the cover of any environmental calendar.
Approaching these full-bellied birds is Dr. Bill Fraser, a rangy, gin-
ger-haired scientist and 25-year ice veteran from Montana State
University. Working here on the highest, driest, coldest continent on
Earth, he has become one of the world’s leading authorities on pen-
guins. He is in his usual uniform of beater bill cap, blue fleece jacket,
and deeply stained boat pants and boots.
“Looks like the birds are having problems finding food this year,”
he tells me. “Normally it takes them six hours, but now we’re finding
they’re spending as much as 16 hours a day foraging for krill.”
How does Fraser know the birds’ diets and the availability of their
prey? One way is a technique called diet sampling.
Fraser approaches one of the foot-and-a-half-tall adelies. Holding
its wings out for balance, it veers away to his left. But before it can get
more than a few paces, his long-handled net flashes faster than a strik-
ing leopard seal, and the bird’s hanging upside down 4 feet off the
ground.
Fraser reaches into the net and extracts it by a flipperlike wing,
walking the bird over to where fellow researchers Matt Irinaga and
Donna Patterson have set up their diet-sampling equipment, including
a Black & Decker field transfer pump.
Patterson kneels on a padded board, taking the bird between her
knees. Fraser has a big insulated jug full of warm saline water around
100°F (the same temperature as the bird’s stomach). He dips the tip of
an attached plastic tube into mineral oil so as not to hurt the bird’s throat
and slips it down its gullet. He then runs water through the tube with the
hand pump until the bird starts to gurgle. At this point they pull the tube
and the bird starts upchucking krill. They hold the bird tail end up until
it empties out into a bucket. It does not sound as bad as a drunken fresh-
man at the tail-end of a frat party, more like a pitcher of ice water being
poured out. I record the sound on my mini disc recorder for Marketplace
Radio, one of the perks of being a far-flung correspondent.
After the crew right the bird, it shakes its head vigorously, getting
regurgitated krill on everyone’s boat pants and fleece jackets, before it
158 David Helvarg