Parenthood Among Penguins
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One of nature’s miracles is the egg-laying and incubating of the emperor penguin in the darkness of the Antarctic night at temperatures of from 50 to 80 degrees below zero.
Dr. Edward Wilson, surgeon of Sir Robert Falcon Scott’s 1901 south polar expedition, found the first emperor rookery and was able to observe it for several days. His account became one of the classics of science. The big birds hatched their eggs, he found, standing on one foot on the ice and holding them against the breast feathers with the other foot. The task evidently was shared by both males and females. The male would take the egg from the female while she trekked to open water to feed on fish. After a few days, Wilson supposed, she would return while the male went after fish.
In 1956 Dr. Bernard Stonehouse of the Falkland Island Dependencies Administration found another emperor rookery and maintained observations for about ten weeks. The behavior observed was even more of a miracle than Dr. Wilson supposed.
After laying their eggs on the ice, Stonehouse noticed, the females leave immediately for open water and remain there for sixty days, the full period of incubation. Presumably they feed constantly during this period. The males take over entirely at the rookery. For two months the husband remains standing on one foot and holding an egg against his breast with the other—presumably shifting his feet now and then. Through the entire hatching period he eats nothing. When the eggs are about to hatch the mothers return from the sea, tidy up the nursery, and get ready to take over rearing the chicks. Then the males, who have exhausted their reserve of fat, stagger feebly in their own mass migration to open water to rebuild their reserves on fish. By the time of the Antarctic sunrise in October the chicks are about ready to fend for themselves.
Standing from three to four feet high and looking and acting deceptively like a human being, the emperor penguin undoubtedly is one of the most remarkable birds in existence. It presumably is confined to the Ross Sea side of the Antarctic continent. The bird—actually it is about two-thirds feathers—remains an evolutionary enigma. Theories have been advanced that it is the last surviving member of the fauna of the Antarctic continent about fifty million years ago when the shorelines were free of ice. It certainly is off any known road of evolution.