Penguin tantrums part of job for TV crew

Press, 13 February 1986, Page 19

Penguin tantrums part of job for TV crew

By

KEITH CLEGG

of the D.S.I.R.

Being squawked at and beaten with penguin flippers is all part of a day’s work for a Television New Zealand film crew making a wildlife documentary in Antarctica this summer. The producer, Neil Harraway of TVNZ’s natural history unit in Dunedin, the cameraman, Tim Pollard, and the soundman, Mike Fitzgerald, both of Christchurch, are also gathering material for an A.B.C. joint .production with the 8.8.0. Their main project is a 50-minute documentary for TVNZ entitled “Wild South.” It will follow a documentary made in Antarctica by Harraway four years ago. This season’s film will pick up birds from the hatching stage and follow them until they go to sea. “The thrust of the story is ‘same time, same place,’ with the strict synchronism that Adelie penguins have to keep,” Harraway says. "Two-thirds of them do everything within the san,e week. “If they are more than

two or three weeks late they will run into trouble at the winter end.[Adults have to moult and get away, and chicks have to be strong enough to get to sea and learn to feed before the summer flush of food disappears, 1

“It is a time of Reckoning with stragglers being picked off by skuas or leopard seals,” he [says. “The same place’ refers to the same site. They go back to the colony and a lot of them go back to the same nest site and the same mate, but not as many as was first thought.”

Originally it was thought about 80 per cent of Adelies went back to the same site and same mate; that figure is now thought to be nearer 50 per cent “They are not as faithful as was supposed,” Harraway says. "They are territorial though. If a chick or an egg rolls out of the colony they will leave it.”

Harraway’s team spent 11 days at Cape Bird, Ross Island, about 80km north of Scott Base. The area is home to 40,000 to 50,000 Adelie penguins and is a

site for long-term penguin studies. After filming there, the team returned to Scott Base to do some of the A.8.C./8.8.C. filming before returning to Cape Bird to film the penguin’s progress to when they start going to sea. Fitzgerald saays the hardest part of his job was finding a colony to record penguin sounds. The colony had to be far enough from others so that every call and noise could be recorded without too much background penguin noise. "It is hard just sitting for four hours, fairly still, in one location. After I have been there about half an hour the birds relax and go about their movements as before,” he 'says. ' “If skuas go and sit right beside them they do not mind us too much.”

Pollard says skuas are the natural predators of Adelie penguins. “When the Adelles get angry they squawk and beat their flippers on your boots,” he says. “They have a distinctive growl and they run and flap at you,” Fitzgerald says.