Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica
by Fen Montaigne

—Reviewed by Jake de Grazia

As its title suggests, Fraser’s Penguins is a book about penguins. It’s also a book about krill, sea ice, climate change, and biologist Bill Fraser, who has been studying polar ecosystems for over 35 years. More than anything, though, Fraser’s Penguins is a book about the chilling (and melting) beauty of Antarctica.

Fraser’s Penguins weaves history, ornithology, geography, marine biology, and climate science into the story of a five-month visit to the Adélie penguin rookeries near Palmer Station, a research outpost just off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Author Fen Montaigne spent the austral summer of late 2005 and early 2006 there, working with Fraser, Fraser’s colleagues, and the squawking, waddling, disappearing subjects of their research.

The book is valuable as a work of ecological explanation. The Antarctic Peninsula is in unprecedented climactic flux, and Montaigne offers readers an impressively clear explanation of the interplay between sun, wind, ice, greenhouse gas pollution, polar axial tilt, and, among other less impressive phenomena, silverfish populations.

The extraordinary beauty of Fraser’s Penguins, however, lies in its descriptions of the continent and its inhabitants. For instance, readers fall deeper into a giant petrel nest than they thought possible:

The first time I slid my cold, gloveless hand under the compliant adult to extract a tiny chick from the sauna-like warmth of the brood patch, I was astonished. The downy chicks had a pleasantly earthy scent, which some team members compared to Doritos, though most others detected the aroma of a newborn baby. I associated the aroma most closely with the scent of my dog’s paws.

And it describes the icy land- and seascapes so lovingly that readers might easily mistake Montaigne for a native of the continent:

When I first stood atop the highest point on Dream Island… and gazed at a dazzling sea dotted to the horizon with icebergs, at several humpback whales spouting a mile away, at the scores of nearby islands in the Joubin chain, at more than a thousand penguins arrayed across the island’s craggy landscape, and at Mount Français soaring soaring above the Marr Ice Piedmont, there was no question in my mind why someone had designated this place Dream: Its beauty was so far outside the realm of human experience that it did not seem real.

Fraser’s Penguins is a book overflowing with four-story icebergs and half-ton leopard seals, a book smeared with krill-red penguin excrement, a book that makes you want to strap on your wool-lined rain-pants, jump into the nearest Zodiac, and motor head-on into ice-cold 25-mile-per-hour winds. If, of course, you’re into that sort of thing.

Excerpt: “The day before, I’d watched an Adélie from that colony march up to one of the seals that had moved too close to the penguin’s chicks and jab the seal in the mouth. The seal had retreated, slithering back several feet as it opened its mouth wide in a display of aggression. Watching a ten-pound penguin rout a thousand-pound seal had reaffirmed my admiration for these birds.”

Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon

Jake de Grazia is Director of Education for the iMatter Campaign. He blogs here and here.

*Photo courtesy of mikehipp