Natural World (1983) s24e11 Episode Script

Antarctica - the continent of the penguins busy little adelies stately emperors and their close relatives - the king penguins Summer is already giving way to the long winter night The first storms of autumn are a warning penguins head for the warmer north The emperors alone stay put in 90-mile-an-hour winds and temperatures of 50 below they lay their eggs How do these birds cope with such extreme weather? And as the climate starts to change what lies ahead for the penguins of the Antarctic? Ice, thousands and thousands of miles of ice on both the sea and the land Antarctica's mainland is larger than Europe but it lies under an ice cap two miles thick In late autumn, there's no life here at all except at a few places where the frozen land meets the frozen sea This dot on the northwest coast is one of them an emperor penguin colony The world's most grueling winter is on its way so how have the emperors prepared for it by starting new families They've courted and mated and the eggs are laid, one per pair The mothers won't brood it though the father will and one of the most precarious parts of the whole process is the hand-over Too many seconds on the ice and the egg will freeze So it's quickly onto the father's feet and snuggled under a fold of skin The mothers need to go to sea producing such a big egg has taken a lot out of them They have to eat now and they'll be back in the spring After a short hike, they reach a break in the ice take a gulp of air and enter the element where they're most at home As for the fathers, and the end of the last iota of warmth Now they have darkness, savage winds nothing to eat and nothing to do but take their turn at the edge of the huddle and shuffle along on their heels as they keep their eggs off the ice There is no sun but they may get some comfort from the moon and the stars and the dancing southern lights There's an inner comfort too the instinctive confidence that the sun will return and with it their mates Further north, other penguins have other concerns If there are no islands around, they try to board icebergs These are chinstrap penguins they and the other small penguins won't return to Antarctica until spring their time to breed Icy footholds are irrelevant, of course, to birds that fly Storm petrels and fairy prions can simply rest on the unremitting southern winds A wandering albatross rides the gale There are a few battered islands including South Georgia The second-largest penguins, the kings, breed here The chicks have already hatched and they huddle together, waiting for their parents to bring them some food They're kept warm by thick downy coats so unlike their eventual adult feathers that the first explorers here thought they were a new species the woolly penguin Sometimes, a king penguin parent will turn up with food but these chicks, so are the albatross chicks, generally do without This young albatross, high up on a cliff has been alone and unfed for 3 months now while his parents travel the southern seas Many miles south and many degrees colder the emperor fathers are still in darkness Then, as the southern hemisphere begins to tilt back towards the sun there is a hint of a new year in Antarctica The sun seems almost shy in its reappearance it won't come clear of the horizon, just skims along it for a few hours bring very little light and no warmth The temperature is still 30 below, it's still deep winter As if the sun has sent a signal, it's now that the eggs hatch This is now a bird - a hungry one only the mother can do anything about that If the mother doesn't bring food in a few days the father who is himself starving will have to head for the sea and leave the chick to die From somewhere out there, the mothers are coming When they left for the sea, it was only a short walk away Since then, the winter has extended the sea ice and the trek back can be as far as 40 miles Leopard seals and killer whales were waiting for them but the injured keep going with the same determination as everyone else Each mother calls for her mate The pairs celebrate their survival, their reunion, and their chick When the greeting ceremony is over, it's time to transfer the chick but the father's been through hell with this baby and doesn't always find it easy to let go Eventually, he does The chick eats at last a meal of fish and squid caught a mile underwater and carried 40 miles over ice Now the fathers will finally go and get to eat too Not all the mothers have come back a chick finds itself abandoned and then adopted not all the surviving mothers have been able to find their mates In fact, demand is greater than supply And females will actually fight over orphans In the end, there's no chance that one female can raise a foundling by herself and almost all abandoned chicks are abandoned again One parent is needed to keep the chick warm while the other goes for food and for the next 9 months, the successful fathers and mothers will do this in shifts making and remaking the long slog over the sea ice In the early spring, it's at its greatest extent Sometimes though there are pit stops thanks to Waddell seals which use their teeth to keep breathing holes open Whales make holes too The seals wear down their teeth and end up toothless, and starve The temperature of the water under the ice is below zero but is kept liquid by the salt content No unprotected human could swim under here and survive but for Antarctic animals, it's like a warm bath compare to conditions above the ice And while the top of the ice is bleak and barren just a few feet down is a busy living world Shrimp-like krill, a staple food in the Antarctic come here for their winter growth relatively safe from penguins and seals, at least until the ice melts This is a world that humans have only recently been able to explore and nearly every day something new is discovered down here In 2005, for instance scientists show that the abundance of krill depended largely on the amount of winter sea ice The extent of the ice is affected by climate change something many scientists have come here specifically to study One thing they've also established is that the winter storms around Antarctica are getting more severe The sea is becoming more treacherous for penguins, such as the chinstrap On South Georgia, these king penguin chicks are on the verge of starving Very occasionally, parents have turned up with food, but mostly the chicks have been living off their fat As spring gets closer, the wandering albatrosses begin to make regular visits to their nests They can range over 700 miles a day gathering food for their chick, now the size of a swan When spring does come, it comes to these outer islands first After a season at sea, the king penguins return millions of animals will come ashore on these outlying Antarctic islands King penguins, relatives of emperors, prefer warmer climates Does climate change mean that some day the kings will ouster the emperors Among the arrivals are the