Good Housekeeping Gentoo Penguin, D\u2019Hainaut Island Palmer Archipelago

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beaks, plump white bellies, deep blueblack along their densely feathered flippers and backs and brush-like tails. They enter the sea to feed and return scrambling up the sheer edges of the fast ice. Then climb the steep slope, and slide and paddle along the snow covered ridge from one small contingent to another, gathered without apparent purpose.

Not yet.But soon...

Good Housekeeping

Gentoo Penguin, D’Hainaut Island Palmer Archipelago

Photos and editorial © Mark Seth Lender

The island is by itself, out in the center of an open circle of land, like the navel of a volcanic cone. Though all the volcanoes hereabouts, just off the Antarctic Peninsula long ago burnt out, their heat extinguished. Now the warmth (too much of it) instead of rising from beneath descends from the air.

A colony of penguins still lives there. Gentoos, big pink-orange feet and bright red-orange

Near the highpoint where the blue basalt is too worn at the crown for ice and snow to cling, a pair of gentoos are off by themselves. They have the look (rounded and well-fed) of an older couple married late and entering middle age. In penguin years? They probably are. In penguin heart and mind still young, proved by what they are doing here: Picking out what will be their family home.

She lies in a depression in the rock that rounds to her shape like a bowl. He stands by, while she tests the comfort of the place. They all but close their eyes, as if the future is screened for them behind the lids. And he bows all the way down to her as she opens her mouth calling up to him, then him to her. And their beaks cross and though they do not touch, and in this way begins the making of a choice, that is no choice, but only determined by the force of something built into them. A ritual performed by rote and not by Mind? Perhaps.

But then, she climbs out.Together they peer in.

Walk, all around the edge of the bowl looking it over. He steps into the middle. Settles on his feet.

Climbs out. And they call to each other again bending low and crossing beaks again.

Now, her turn.She stands inside.

It’s comfortable enough, yes, and the right size, yes, and the eggs will fit and not roll out. Their gaze explains all the considerations.

At last he looks all around surveying the view. They close their eyes again (he likes it too) they pause, not moving now, as if to say, “Let’s take it. It works for us.”

They will stay here.

It is mutual. No question of that. And little question it was mostly up to her. All the while she was laying down she reached out, her flipper at a deliberate angle of no necessity for either balance, nor measurement, but just enough to rest upon his feet.

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Field Note:

The largest part of what you see in the field – or don’t - is in the timing. Trinity Island, off the northwest side of the Antarctic Peninsula is a lucky place to arrive at, an accomplishment in of itself. On Trinity’s south end is Michelson Harbor and at its center a squib of land called D’Hainaut Island, wildliferich, and home to a colony of gentoo penguins. I arrived at the beginning of breeding season, and spent time with what was probably the very first pair to pick a nest site.

Luck inside of luck within luck.

Gentoos do not allopreen, meaning they do not groom each other. Which in turn means, they do not touch. Where I truly had my luck was not just seeing the female’s flipper resting on her mate’s foot, but in recognizing how unusual that was. Hence this working interpretation: what I saw was the same warming gesture as holding hands

or more literally touching the bare foot of the other of our species with whom we are in love.

It is impossible not to love penguins. Much of this is projection, I suppose, determined by their upright stance

and the rest by their apparent harmlessness, an impression compounded by awkwardness on land, this bird whose only flight is within the sea. Perhaps our very liking is what leads science to its stern determinations. That intelligence in any meaningful sense of the word is the exception, in any bird, and so we assign the greater share of what we observe in penguins to long-established genes directing small and simple brains.

But that’s not what I saw which was, penguins making an examination of the facts, leading to consent, and decision.

It blinds us sometimes, our preconceptions, that go all the way back to the beginning of our profitable hegemony over life on earth.

Mark Seth Lender is a producer for wildlife content at Living on Earth ( LOE.org ), the only program on US Public Radio exclusively dedicated to wildlife and environmental reporting.