The Story Behind the Photograph
Penguins are brave in groups and honest alone. At the edge of an ice floe, a crowd of Adélies had been gathering all morning, packed shoulder to shoulder, everyone waiting for someone else to be first into water where a leopard seal might be waiting. Penguin courage works by committee: the crowd thickens, the pushing starts, and suddenly the whole front row is airborne whether it voted to be or not.
I watched three of these mass launches from the zodiac, and each time one bird — there is always one — pulled up at the brink. This frame caught the moment perfectly: a line of penguins porpoising off the edge in a chain of splashes, and the last one in, wings out, leaning over the edge with every fiber of its being asking whether this was really necessary. A heartbeat later it went too. It was always going to go. But the hesitation is the photograph.
About Adélie Penguins
Adélies are the classic penguin of the deep south — feisty, tuxedoed, and utterly dependent on sea ice. They breed in vast colonies around the Antarctic coast and feed primarily on krill, commuting between colony and ice edge in groups precisely because of predators like the leopard seal. Their populations have become important indicators of Southern Ocean health, tracked by researchers including the British Antarctic Survey; on the warming Peninsula some colonies are shrinking even as others, further south, grow.
Anyone who spends an hour at an ice edge understands why field biologists are so fond of them: Adélies conduct their entire emotional lives in public.
Photographer's Notes
Long lens from the zodiac, high shutter speed, focus held on the ice edge and patience held on the crowd. Timing is everything and is mostly luck disciplined by anticipation — after the second launch you learn to read the crowd's pressure and fire early. At the shows this was the photograph that made people laugh out loud, and it sold steadily to office walls in particular. Apparently every workplace has a last one in. It hangs beside the Emperor Penguin Family and the Antarctic Picture Frame in the collection's southern wing.