A year earlier, I witnessed a different kind of ice show. A Weddell seal I was watching suddenly raised her tail and deposited a pup on the ice. A southern giant petrel incubating on its nest towers over a chilly sea on Penguin Island off the Antarctic Peninsula. Related to albatrosses, the giant petrel is also as large as some albatrosses. O n an ice shelf beside the Weddell Sea, an adult emperor penguin and a large chick nearly ready to moult watch the strange behavior of people with cameras in their colony.
Emperors spend the winter on fast ice just off the continent's shore.
Unlike the giant petrels and adelie penguins, they do not build nests. I found this juxtaposition of the penguins and three of my traveling companions from the Russian icebreaker particularly amusing because the preoccupied people were unaware that the penguin gawkers had actually moved closer to them than the penguins they were photographing. S paced exactly one pecking distance away from nasty neighbors, adelie penguins at Paulet Island on the Antarctic Peninsula form a perfect pattern based on just enough personal space to make their colony workable. Adelies breed within the continent's zone of pack ice but, unlike emperors, leave during brutal winters. Every spring more than 2 million of the birds trek over the ice, hopping out of the sea and waddling dozens of miles toward windswept, bare ground to breed in colonies like this one.