The Emperors Embrace, Part 2

The Emperor's Embrace: Reflections on Animal Families and Fatherhood
by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Ph.D.

(Page 2 of 2)

Nonetheless, there is always a small minority of restless males who insist on making small sorties into the frozen countryside. Sometimes up to nine males with eggs will leave the colony together and be found some four miles away. Cendron observed fourteen males with their eggs more than a mile from the colony, who by evening had managed to return through thick snow, their eggs precariously balanced. When it is snowing very hard, it is the rare hardy soul who ventures out. But there are always a few who do so. They no longer walk, but lie on their bellies and, using their wings, toboggan themselves forward, keeping the egg pressed against the incubating pouch with their feet. Even an injured bird will continue to protect his egg: One penguin had a bad wound on his foot that did not permit him to stand up. He kept apart from the other birds and managed to keep his egg balanced on his single good foot even without standing. Was he also doomed to remain outside the tortue? The report does not say. But whatever happens, the first concern of the male emperor is for his egg. As Bernard Stonehouse put it: "Birds have been known to fall over small precipices, roll down snowy slopes, trip over rocks, tumble heavily on slippery bare ice, or navigate their way among very rough sastrugi [ridges of hard snow] without releasing their grip on the eggs."

The only time a father will abandon an egg is if he has reached the maximum limit of his physiological ability to fast, and would die if he did not seek food. Not a small number of eggs are left for this reason, and it would seem that in each case the female is late in returning.

Nobody knows whether the emperor father "speaks" to the chicks inside the egg. I think it is possible, as do ornithologists I spoke to about it. Konrad Lorenz, in his beautiful book The Year of the Greylag Goose, noted that the mother goose communicates with her goslings before they hatch from their eggs by making very soft contact calls to them. They in turn are capable of making a number of different calls, which allow the mother to know whether they are developing normally. When they produce a plaintive call, known as "lost piping" (the same sound they will make later in life when they are separated from the family), the mother will respond with comforting contact calls, the equivalent of "I am here." The gander, a good father to his young, takes up a position by the nest and is on high alert as soon as he hears any sounds from within the egg. A number of different birds (domestic chicks, Peking and mallard ducklings) call from within the egg, and it would be worthwhile attempting to discover whether the emperor penguin chicks are among them, and what response is forthcoming from their devoted fathers.

In July or August, after being gone for almost three months, the female emperor returns from the sea, singing as she penetrates various groups of birds, searching for her mate and her chick or egg. The males do not move, but make small peeping noises. When she finds her husband, she sings, she makes little dance steps, then she goes quiet and both birds can remain immobile for up to ten minutes. Then they begin to move around one another. Prévost describes how the female then fixes her eyes on the incubatory pouch of her partner, while her excitement grows visibly. Finally, if it is the right bird, the male allows the egg to fall gently to the ice, whereupon the female takes it and then turns her back to the male, to whom, after a final duet, she becomes completely indifferent. The male becomes increasingly irritated, stares at his empty pouch, pecks at it with his beak, lifts up his head, groans, and then pecks the female. She shows no further interest in him and eventually he leaves for the open sea, to break his long fast. The whole affair has lasted about eighty minutes.

How difficult it is for us to understand the emotions involved in these events. Yet it is hard to resist the anthropomorphic urge. Obviously the male emperor is aware of the loss of what has, after all, been almost a part of his body for two to three months. Is he disappointed, bewildered, relieved, or are his feelings so remote from our own (not inferior, mind you, just different) that we cannot imagine them? We would groan, too, under such circumstances, but the meaning of a penguins groan is still opaque to us. Yet we, too, are fathers and mothers with babies to protect and comfort, negotiating meals and absences and other obligations, just like our Antarctic cousins. Sometimes, when we are overwhelmed by an emotion, we are hard-pressed to express ourselves. If penguin fathers could speak about this moment in their lives, perhaps they would be at a similar loss for words. Perhaps the songs and groans of the male penguin are all the expression they need.

How is it, one wonders, that the female emperor penguin is able to return just in time for the birth of her chick? As Alexander Skutch notes in his wonderful book, The Minds of Birds, it is improbable that she has consciously counted the sixty-three days or whatever the exact number is between the laying of her egg and the hatching of her chick. "Only a most exceptional human could accurately time such long intervals without a calendar, notching a tally-stick or some such device. Some subconscious process, physiological or mental, was evidently summing the days to prompt the birds to start homeward when the proper number had elapsed."

If the egg has hatched and the male already has a chick between his legs, the female is even more excited to hear it peep, and quickly removes it from the male. She immediately regurgitates food to the chick. If she is late in coming (the miracle is that the mothers usually return on the day their chicks hatch), the male, in spite of his near starvation, has a final resource: He regurgitates into the beak of his peeping newborn a substance known as penguin milk, similar to pigeons milk, or crop milk, which is secreted from the lining of his esophagus. The secretion is remarkably rich, containing essential amino acids, much like the milk of marine mammals such as seals and whales. It contains 29 percent fat and 59 percent protein (cows milk contains just 4 percent fat and 3 percent protein). These feedings allow the young birds to survive for up to two weeks after hatching. Many of these males have now fasted for four and a half months, and have lost up to half of their body weight. It is a sight to see the well-nourished, sleek, brilliantly feathered, healthy-looking females arrive, and the emaciated, dirty, tired males leave.

Bernard Stonehouse, one of the first scientists to research the life of penguins, wrote an influential article in 1953 about the emperor's breeding habits. But he did not know that females returned to the same male. He thought they took anyone, and wrote that "there was no indication in the rookery that any female returned to a specific male, or took charge of any particular chick; there is no family life." He was wrong on this point. As the eminent French explorer J. Prévost noted in 1963, it really makes no sense that the females are searching frantically unless they are searching for somebody specific. No matter how long it takes her, the female eventually finds her partner and therefore her own egg or chick. She does this through sound, through vision, and through memory.

The females have brought enough undigested food to feed the chicks every hour at first, then, once the chicks are bigger, two or three times a day. Penguin parents suspend digestion when bringing food home to their chicks by secreting a wall of protective mucus around the crop content. If prevented from feeding their chicks, penguins may discard the food rather than digest it themselves. (An emperor in captivity starved to death by feeding all his rations — about six pounds of fish daily — to an importunate chick.) Between twenty and thirty-four days later, the father returns, well nourished also, and now the two of them can take turns returning to the sea to feed. The chicks remain on the feet of their parents for about forty to fifty days from the time they hatch.

By September or October, the chicks have grown enough to run free. They then form what are known as crèches, penguin nurseries, consisting exclusively of chicks, with no adults present to guard or take care of them in any way. Why these nurseries form is not clear (for company?), but when the weather turns ugly, the crèches are quickly transformed into tortues, with the same function for the chicks as for the adults. Whether the ability to form tortues is innate or is the result of observing the adults is hard to say, but it is probably the former. Even when they are in the crèches, the parents still feed them, although more sporadically. On their return to the crèches once every week or two, the adults spend anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days with their chicks, which probably led earlier observers to believe that the crèches were guarded by adults. Why some adults stay longer there than others is not known, and perhaps there is some aspect of guarding to the behavior.

Early authors thought this feeding was communal or random: Any adult penguin would feed any penguin chick (the same mistake was made about bats). This turns out not to be true. What happens is that the parents join up and together approach each crèche in turn and sing. It is a little like human parents setting off to day care to pick up their children. This song may cause no reaction at all until one of the chicks approaches and gives an answering song. There are sometimes five thousand chicks to be examined. It resembles a test, since several chicks will often come forward. Before giving a second song, the mother or father penguins will rub their heads with the top part of their wings, just as they did earlier when they were courting. Then they will make a little dance step that encourages the chick to move away from the crèche, and only then will the adult feed the chick.

Stonehouse describes penguin chicks in their winter crèches when their parents return from the sea to feed them: "The parent stands at the edge of the crèche, which may contain two or three thousand tightly packed, sleeping chicks, and gives its own distinctive call. Immediately one little head shoots up from the mass, one piercing whistle sounds a frenetic reply, and the chick begins to fight its way through apathetic companions to meet its parent for breakfast." In spite of such care, he points out that a quarter to a half of the hatched chicks die, usually from a bird predator (skuas and petrels) or by wandering away and freezing or starving. What an awful feeling it must be for the parents not to find their chicks. We may well reject the notion of a melancholy penguin as human sentiment run wild, but I find the idea impossible to dismiss out of hand. After such care, why should a parent penguin not feel bereft at its loss?

Given penguins concern for their own children, there are some disturbing observations, one of them made by Prévost. He noticed that giant petrels (the family of seabirds that includes albatrosses) will sometimes choose a small chick on the edge of the colony, open his abdomen with their beaks, and then eat the contents. The chick will only rarely cry out, "and the adults who are standing nearby are generally completely indifferent to his fate." This is one of those times when empathy or sympathy fails, and we cannot, or at least I cannot, imagine how one could be in the penguins place as an indifferent bystander. Perhaps because the situation is so rare — penguins, as we have seen, have almost no predators on land — they are simply unprepared and therefore literally blind to what is happening in front of their eyes: We cannot see what we do not know. Perhaps the chick, by not singing, is not recognized.

One possible explanation comes from observation of kittiwake gulls. In a classic paper, Esther Cullen described her experiences with these birds over several years in the Farne Islands off the Northumberland coast. These gulls, unlike any other, nest on tiny cliff ledges, about four inches wide. This gives them almost complete protection from predators and they have developed a number of interesting behavioral changes as a result. Since they are so rarely attacked, they did not swoop at Cullen when she climbed among the nests. She watched a herring gull catch a young kittiwake in the air: "Even when it did so only a couple of feet from a nesting cliff the adult birds left their nests merely to hover in a completely silent cloud over the scene without interfering, while the chick was screaming and trying to defend itself against the powerful beak of its attacker." The explanation is that the kittiwake is simply not prepared for such events and does not know how to respond, since the attack is so far out of its normal experience. I think this same explanation could apply to emperor penguins.

Mysteriously, it has been noted that most birds, including skuas, sworn enemies of penguins, will not attack crèches, even though the babies could do nothing to defend themselves and there are usually no adults nearby to protect them. It is not clear why this should be so. Is there a skua code of honor?

By December, the ice has begun to melt, so that chicks (whose thermal feathers had to grow in) and adults are able to ride out to sea on the ice floes. They might ride on the same iceberg, but it is not clear whether they are still a family. Nobody knows precisely what happens to the emperor chicks when they ride these ice floes with their parents out to sea. I asked Dr. Gerald Kooyman, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, whether the chicks stay with their parents when they are at sea, and he told me that they do not. We know that at least 80 percent of fledglings die in their first year at sea. The survivors will spend four to five years at sea before they return to breed when they are five years old. Since penguins are not sexually mature until they are between five and eight years of age, one wonders what their life consists of during the time before they take partners. Whether a pair stays together at sea is not clear.

What do penguins do when they are at sea? These remarkable birds (who seem more fishlike than birdlike) spend most of their time in the Antarctic Ocean fishing. Or so it would seem. We should remember that the sea is the natural habitat for a penguin. Even their feathers are made for water: Their short, slightly curved feathers alternate and overlap like tiles on a roof. The tips are oily enough to repel water and keep the sea out. A mat of downy filaments grows from the shaft of each feather, forming with its neighbors a dense undershirt lying close to the skin. This traps a layer of warm air, and acts as additional waterproofing in case the outer layer of feather tips breaks down. We often think of penguins as clumsy creatures when they are waddling along the ice, but in the water, it is a completely different story, for they are in their element. Adult penguins spend 75 percent of their lives (which, according to at least one report, can be as long as thirty-four years) in the water, where they literally fly through the sea, using their wings in this different habitat. It is as if they surrendered their ability to soar through the air in order to "fly" through the water better, as Edward Hoagland suggested when he saw them on a trip to the Antarctic, which he wrote about in Tigers and Ice (see Suggested Reading).

Since the adults do not return to land, or even to the Antarctic ice shelves, for months at a time, one wonders what they drink. At sea, penguins distill their own fresh water, using special nasal glands that lie embedded in the skull immediately above the eyes. Although they make hundreds of dives a day, they only spend about four hours a day diving. Nobody knows for certain what they do the rest of the time. Nothing, many people assume, which makes them seem stupid. Thus Robert Cushman Murphy says in his great 1936 book, Oceanic Birds of South America: The corpus striatum, rather than the cerebrum, is the seat of their being, and the brain, for all its great expansion, is concerned far more with keen sensory susceptibilities and delicate muscular coordination than with any processes that might properly be termed 'mental.' Why, after all, should a penguin need 'brains' when its fundamental and inherited behavior pattern takes care of it through the seasonal cycle and the generations? But of course Cushman had no idea that these emperor penguins had such elaborate parenting habits. Nor did anyone know until very recently that they made such deep benthic dives, to the bottom of the sea, another remarkable feature of the emperor. When they move under water, their heart rate drops to five or six beats per minute (one twentieth of the normal rate). Dr. Kooyman tells me that these dives can be up to 500 meters deep, and last for up to twenty minutes. Only elephant seals can forage at such depths, certainly no other bird. Kooyman believes the function of these dives may be to provide their chicks with the gastric stones both male and females feed them back at the rookery, probably for digestive purposes.

If they do not stay with their mates, they do for certain meet up with other penguins. Bernard Stonehouse explains that "lone penguins of any kind seem restless, incomplete creatures; unless moulting or dying (when they prefer to be alone) their most pressing aim is to find other penguins, preferably but not necessarily of their own species, with whom they can stand in silent but satisfying communion." The reason, he says, for their conviviality is that "solitary birds are prone to dangers — getting lost, failing to find food when it is scarce or patchy, or being eaten by seals and other predators — which diminish when they travel in company." I think it is possible that they simply enjoy company.

I make no secret of the awe in which I hold the father emperor penguin; some, though, might argue against a heroic element to his parental solicitude. "But that is simply what emperor penguins do, there is nothing heroic in doing what you are programmed to do, whereas you make it sound like the penguin has made an individual choice," someone might object. There is some truth to this, for we tend to reserve the term "heroic" for an act that is chosen over other easier or more convenient ones. Nonetheless, human heroes, too, will often explain that they only did what seemed natural to them, or they had no choice, or they were brought up to behave in this way. So if emperor penguin fathers are simply acting as penguins, it is still impressive to our eyes.

Moreover, we are only beginning to learn of the astonishing paternal feats of emperor penguins. Few people have ever observed their fathering behavior closely for an extended period of time, for obvious reasons: The conditions of their habitat are extremely harsh, even perilous. Captive emperor penguins do not behave in a normal fashion when it comes to procreation and fathering. We might be surprised to learn that there is far more variation in paternal behavior than we assume, ranging from fathers who never abandon an egg or a chick under any circumstance to others who flee at the first sign of a bad storm. Perhaps the high rate of infant mortality (though the figures may not be reliable, based as they are on a relatively small sample) can be accounted for by this variability in paternal competence. Scientists find something disturbing in the notion that a penguin can deliberately choose his behavior. Similarly, the thought that a mother penguin at sea might suddenly think consciously about the birth of her chick, and decide consciously to return to land, is vaguely disturbing. It is easier to believe that some internal clock simply turns on and she finds herself heading for home for no reason that she can understand. But isnt it possible that she is heading back with a vivid image in her mind of her new chick driving her, hurrying her on? Similarly, the male emperor must feel relief when he sees her approaching. His hunger is extreme, his patience has been exemplary. Now it is time for him to head for the open sea as well and replenish his strength. These are the emotions that humans would feel under these circumstances; I can see no good reason to deny them to penguins.

When I visit the playground on a weekend and see all the fathers, many looking bored no doubt, but still there when they could be someplace else, I am struck by how children come into our lives and simply demand that we give them immediate priority — and we respond. There are many pleasures more exciting than sitting in a sandbox with a three year old digging holes, or sitting at the seashore building castles. More exciting, but in some absolute sense, less fulfilling. There is nothing that feels more remarkably right than being with our children, attending to their small pleasures, observing with satisfaction their joy. We may not be emperor penguins, but our embrace of our children is not totally unlike theirs in these moments of parental devotion. We too feel a devotion to our young that makes us forego ordinary pleasures to ensure that they survive and thrive.

One of Americas great paleontologists, the late George Gaylord Simpson, was fascinated by penguins. At the end of a book he wrote about them in 1976, Penguins Past and Present, he said, "Finally, the question may be asked, 'What good are penguins?' It may be crass to ask what good a wild animal is, but I do think the question may also be legitimate. That depends on what you mean by good. If you mean 'good to eat,' you are perhaps being stupid. If you mean 'good to hunt,' you are surely being vicious. If you mean 'good as it is good in itself to be a living creature enjoying life,' you are not being crass, stupid or vicious. I agree with you and I am your brother as well as the penguin's." I think we can go even further, and say that it is good to watch the emperor penguin, to learn from the emperor penguin, to lionize the emperor penguin as he proudly embraces the tiny ball of fluff on his feet.

Copyright © 1999 by Jeffrey Masson

About the Author

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is the author of several books, including Dogs Never Lie About Love, When Elephants Weep, The Assault on Truth, Final Analysis, and My Father's Guru. After receiving a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard, he completed a full clinical training program in psychoanalysis at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute. Masson served for one year as Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in London. He now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.