taking the PlUnge | 31Equally remarkable were journeys undertaken by the Emperors’ smaller
relatives, King Penguins.^3 Eighteen fledglings of this sub- Antarctic spe-
cies were tracked from the Falkland Islands and from South Georgia.
Most birds initially made for the Antarctic Polar Front, a zone of high
marine productivity (see Chapter 8) midway between the Falklands and
South Georgia. There is a hint here that the birds ‘knew’ where to go.
Then, after a period spent in this zone, seven of the eight birds that were
still able to be tracked four months after fledging passed through the
Drake Passage into the Pacific Ocean, while the eighth turned east to-
wards the southern Indian Ocean. With average daily distances trav-
elled of 45 km, equalling an onshore marathon, no wonder the penguins
travelled up to 4,500 km from the colony. Pride of place went to a pen-
guin named ‘Youngster’ by the tracking team. Over a nine- month track-
ing period, it generated a total track of about 12,000 km.
While the Emperor and King Penguin chicks make an abrupt transi-
tion to total independence on entering the water, another species breaks
the leash to its parents more circumspectly. Gentoo Penguin chicks take
their first trip to sea at about 70 days, before finally departing the col-
ony 12 days later. Over the course of this transition period, individual
chicks made an average of five trips to sea, returning to the colony to
cadge a meal from their parents.^4
It would be wrong to think that swimming away from the colony pre-
cludes a prolonged association between parent and chick. Amongst the
smallest auks are the five North Pacific murrelet species in the tongue-
twisting genus Synthliboramphus, meaning compressed beak. These birds,
weighing around 150– 200 g, breed in colonies where the eggs – normally
two – are laid either in rock crevices at more open colonies, or amongst
the tree roots of dank coastal forests, gloomy between the trunks of
spruce and hemlock. Parents come and go under cover of darkness, pre-
sumably to avoid predators. For the same reason the chicks are raised
entirely at sea: they are never fed at the nest. Instead the young, whose
legs and feet are almost adult- sized when they hatch from remarkably
large eggs*, head to sea a couple of days after hatching.
- (^) The egg mass is about 22 percent of the mother’s.