The Discovery of Animal Behaviour [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONI write this in the Antarctic, not too far from where, in the shadow of the gently puffing volcano. Mount Erebus, the bleached huts once inhabited by Scott and Shackleton stand preserved by the frigid climate. Before me is an awesome, dazzling white vista of broken ice extending across the Ross Sea towards the mountains of Victoria Land. The air has such clarity that the eye is deceived in the estimation of distances. Those peaks over three thousand metres high appear a mere afternoon's walk away, but are, in fact, seventy-five kilometres to the west. In such a place as this, you might be forgiven for thinking that nothing stirs except the snow driven by the unrelenting polar wind, and the restless sea. And yet, here at Cape Bird, at the tip of Ross Island, just over a thousand kilometres from the South Pole, I can watch animals in action.Two hundred metres away, a Weddell seal pup, which miraculously survives in its chilly cradle of sea ice> pesters its plump mother for food. She is dozing in the noon-day sun, but her baby snaps at her bewhiskered face and wails mournfully. She eventually relents, rolling languidly onto her flank to expose her nipples and offer a supply of warm, creamy milk. In a lead which has opened up in the ice, a lone minke whale surfaces for a second or two, lifts its flukes high in a flurry of cascading water, and sounds, leaving a cloud of steamy breath hanging in the air as the only evidence, tangible though ephemeral, of its brief appearance. Closer by, a more menacing animal lurks - a leopard seal whose beguiling smile belies its savage disposition. It has learned to patrol the edge of the ice where there is good traffic in penguins. At the northern end of Ross Island, there is no shortage of these quaint creatures. From where I sit, I can see the suburbs of a rookery of around 25,000 pairs of Adelie penguins. The odour has that suffocating mustiness characteristic of seabird cities; the air resonates to the clamour of braying and trumpeting birds vying for the choicest territories. Such a throng of penguins busily breedingis as impressive a sight as any naturalist like myself could wish Adelie penguin rookery on for, and is the reason for my being here in quest of film for the Ross island in Antarctica