March of the Penguins

I seldom watch movies and almost never write about them, but I wanted to write about this wonderful documentary I saw with my family called, “March of the Penguins.” This small French team spent nine months in Antarctica to film the remarkable story of the reproductive habits of the penguins and the incredible hardships these birds go through just to produce their offspring.

It is just incredible to see all these birds walking single-file in the snow to reach the breeding ground. Once in a while the lead penguin will be lost and they will gather around not knowing where to go. Then someone remembers and leads them on. Eventually they reach the site. And for the males, that is where they will stay for four months.

This is the incredible thing: they don’t eat. They go completely without food for months so that they can help raise one chick. First they spend a couple of weeks looking for a mate. Then they wait until the egg is laid which takes about two months. Then the females – who are in desperate hunger at this point – pass the egg to the male and the females take off to the sea to eat. Sometimes the eggs roll off in the passing and the egg almost instantly freezes and their efforts are completely wasted. They showed some scenes of parents looking at their frozen eggs – just heartbreaking.

The females go to the ocean and eat for two months to build back strength while the male incubates the egg. This is in the dead of the Antarctic winter. Some penguins just freeze to death during the extreme winds and cold temperatures. They need to keep their egg on their feet and keep it warm with their bellies for the entire time – for four months!

When the chicks finally hatch, they give them a little stored food they kept somewhere in their stomachs. It is amazing the sacrifice these birds will go through for a chick.

Then the females return – and not a moment too soon. They take over caring for the chicks while the males return to the sea. Each of these journeys is about seventy miles and when you see the penguins waddle it looks like the equivalent of a human journey of 1000 miles. Many males simply die on the way back to sea – they were just too weak. And many chicks die of freezing and predators. It really is a tough life for a penguin.

After a couple of months, the females leave – often before the males return – because they are so hungry. The males return once again to care for the chick until it is ready to go into the ocean.

And that is the most extreme anti-climax. These parents suffered so much for the chicks and by the time the chicks go into the sea the parents are gone. The chicks swim by instinct. And when it is time for them to mate – after four years – they will go through what their parents did by instinct.

I have to say that the French crew did an incredible job capturing all of this on film. The conditions could not been worse for filming or for just living for that matter. But they persevered. Perhaps they were inspired by the penguins.

In ten or twenty years, such a documentary would not be so remarkable. Robotic cameras (which the French did not use) will allow the filmmaker to film the wildlife in the most hostile environments without putting a human in the wild. But for now I have to admire the French crew’s courage and tenacity in bringing this incredible story