MARCH OF THE PENGUINS 2: THE CALL
The story of this emperor is unequaled
among all the wonders of nature.
It is the story of a life that is all the more extraordinary
because it took place in a landscape so hostile
that none of us could survive more than a few hours.
The emperor was born 40 years ago in a place called Oamock,
a small bay nestled between 4 islands on the edge of Antarctica.
At dawn, after a smooth journey, the emperor reached Oamock,
the place where his kind have always gathered.
Each time he returns from the sea,
the emperor always has the same problem: finding his chick.
A needle in a haystack: they are all alike.
To find his chick, every ten steps he calls to it.
Every minute that passes reduces the chances of finding his chick.
Can he have failed so close to his goal?
He feels he lacks the strength to face another winter.
He and his partner have struggled for months to keep him alive.
The struggle began in the early days, five months ago.
His partner had just laid a magnificent egg.
She was keen to entrust it to the emperor
in order to go and feed at sea as soon as possible.
But between them was a patch of ice on which they had no choice
but to roll the egg from one to the other.
If the egg spent more than 20 seconds on the ground,
the embryo inside would die for sure.
Just in time.
Even before being born,
the chick in his fragile shell had faced his first great trial.
But let's return to the emperor, who is still looking for his chick.
Two voices in the crowd interrupt his quest.
His chick is here, and there's a nice surprise,
the emperor's partner is here also.
All three have experienced so many adventures.
To see them now, it's hard to imagine what they've lived through.
Perhaps the most crucial moment in their story
took place a few months before, with temperatures around - 40°C.
The emperor and his companions were huddling for warmth.
He, who hadn't eaten for 4 months, stood fast:
his egg was close to hatching.
The emperor was experienced enough not to lose his egg,
which was not the case for everyone.
He stood without weakening,
in winds that would knock you down in a single gust.
The emperor knew his chick had hatched and was hungry.
And he felt that he too was at the end of his strength.
But his mother was late:
she was due back to feed the chick.
As if to aggravate matters, it hadn't snowed for days.
The emperor and his companions were dying of thirst.
Drunk from fatigue,
they moved around on Oamock to find some clean snow,
not too frozen, so as to quench their thirst.
Males everywhere lacked the strength to wait for their chicks to hatch.
The least experienced among them gave up.
The emperor knew well the internal signals telling him to leave,
to abandon his chick.
His intuition had told him to make one last effort.
The emperor had given him his last meal,
preserved inside him after 4 months without food.
And his partner had returned.
What a reunion!
She with her white plumage washed by the ocean,
and he, the emperor, with his bedraggled feathers,
soiled, worn out by the weeks on the ice floe.
They passed the chick over as calmly as possible.
This chick was truly a survivor.
Today, their chick is here, very much alive,
a little groggy from overeating.
They've been separated by the many trips to the sea
to satisfy their chick's insatiable appetite.
How do they maintain a schedule,
despite the weeks of separation?
To solve the mystery, we must go back nine months
to when the couple had yet to meet.
Oamock was still a quiet bay with calm waters.
Mysteriously, as if responding to a huge general mobilization,
all were seized by a burning desire to set out for Oamock.
After five days of travel,
more than 7,000 of them were travelling together.
Oamock:
the tiny spot on the ice floe on which they all converged.
A kind of unique oasis
protected by a long glacier,
where the cold and wind were less severe than elsewhere.
No-one knows what attracts 2 individuals
in this immense singles fair.
But the emperor and his partner found and liked each other.
To gradually learn how to follow the same tempo as one
and never lose track of each other's rhythm
during the long months they would spend together,
the emperor and his partner had a secret: they were going to dance!
They'd practised the dance so often, they'd remember it for months.
And when they achieved harmony,
they launched themselves into the race for life.
Their chick is nearly as tall as them but is certainly heavier,
as it stays put on Oamock, hardly ever moving.
A strange fever invades the ice floe at this time.
The busy parents form a continuous stream
between Oamock and the ocean.
The emperor knows the route well, but the whims of freezing, tides
and storms change the ice floe and turn it into a chaotic scene
that changes shape every day, creating new traps.
And now the emperor and his companions are impeded
by a huge crack in the ice floe.
More groups keep arriving.
A crowd is forming.
But still no way out.
The emperor, armed with experience, goes scouting.
And after a few days fishing at sea,
the emperor is already back among his own.
It takes a lot of luck for a chick to reach this size.
At this point, only half of those who were born at the same time remain.
We must go back in time to see
how this chick was born under a lucky star.
It was a few weeks before, in early spring.
The chick was now swallowing his meals faster
than the emperor and his partner could provide them.
It was time for his parents to go fishing together
to provide sufficient nourishment.
With a little gentle persuasion,
the emperor had convinced his child to remain alone.
It was hard to take for the chick,
who didn't understand this brutal change of habit.
On leaving him,
the emperor knew his chick would face
new, unknown dangers.
He spent most of his day in a "nursery",
similar to the huddle in which everyone tried to keep warm.
It was to these nurseries
that the emperor and his partner returned singing
to call their chick when they came back from the sea.
But the emperor had learned to dread this period.
The crevasses, the wind, the cold;
all had the potential to end a still-fragile life.
But as the emperor recalled, nothing beat the giant petrels.
Fortunately, the first blow was not fatal,
but the lesson was well learned.
The little emperor now knew
to avoid being isolated on the edge of the colony.
Antarctica is a tough learning environment.
The emperor chick can't make the slightest mistake.
You have to learn fast to be able to grow up here.
His parents, though exhausted by weeks of travel,
continue tirelessly to go and fetch him food.
Their bellies empty on departure and full on return, they go
back and forth thousands of times like the pendulum of a metronome.
The emperor's fate is a curious one.
He must raise his chick far from the ocean,
but can feed only in deep water.
Ten, twenty, thirty,
fifty, a hundred kilometres.
The emperor never knows how long he'll be away.
On the way the emperor realizes the landscape
is transforming with the return of summer.
The ice floe is beginning to crack
under the effect of the heat and the tides.
Another sign
he meets the season's first Adelie penguins,
his little cousins who are back for the summer.
The ocean.
Imagine his pleasure in smelling the salt,
in hearing the waves after the total silence of the ice floe.
The sun is blinding; the whole landscape is infused with light.
A prodigious event is about to take place.
The emperor pauses.
To the eye,
nothing in him has changed.
Yet it is as if, discreetly,
he was transforming into a totally different creature.
The emperor is back in his real kingdom.
The emperor is above all a child of the ocean.
At sea he comes alive.
And when the emperor enters the water, he is transformed.
Up there, ephemeral, chaotic landscapes.
Here, a stable world, outside of time.
Up there, the howling of the wind.
Here, the symphony of marine creatures
that flourish only at great depth.
Up there, the jaws of frost and cold.
Here, long quiet currents on which he glides effortlessly.
His lungs empty, his heart barely beating,
he dives for minutes on end, deep,
very deep
more than 600 metres below the surface.
He is no longer breathing; all his senses are alert.
The emperor's hunt has begun.
Where he's going, no-one will see him.
The emperor hasn't breathed for 2O minutes.
Above him,
the ice floe prevents him from surfacing.
Long cracks begin to fracture the ice floe like a huge jigsaw.
This is only the beginning of the great thaw
that will soon relieve the ocean of its ice roof.
A final race against time has begun.
If the thaw is too rapid,
the sea will engulf the little emperor before he's ready.
Only a few days ago,
he had experienced that very thing on Oamock.
The emperor knows how long he can stay away from his chick,
as if he were aware of the level of hunger the youngster can endure.
This invisible thread between two beings hundreds of kilometres apart
is one of the emperor's greatest secrets.
The emperor and his partner's union has ended well.
They will now separate,
as if the masterpiece of patience and harmony they built together
could exist only once.
After a few bows and a few songs,
the little emperor's mother leaves them.
Who knows if these three will ever meet again?
There is an end-of-season air on Oamock, a kind of relief.
The emperor stays a while with his chick.
Spring whips up one of the last storms of the year,
but the cold has lost its bite,
and no-one thinks of huddling together to keep warm.
Two destinies, hitherto inseparable, are diverging.
One with a lifetime of experience and the other starting out,
with a mountain of challenges to meet
before taking his place in the great epic of his species.
Few have lived as long as the emperor.
But what is the father's experience
compared to the challenges facing his son?
The emperor's story
is a long one whose beginning is lost in the mists of time.
Over time his species has learned the secret of surviving on the ice
and handed it down from generation to generation,
with no apparent learning.
Between two meals, time passes quietly.
It's as if both wanted to prolong the moment.
Is not life here more fragile than a snowflake?
The time has come.
His first great march awaits the little emperor.
But he will do it alone.
His father will precede him on the way.
And so the most venerable of the emperors takes his bow
and embarks on his last journey, with the utmost discretion.
The emperor has abdicated.
The story of a new emperor begins.
It's a discreet coronation that he will accomplish alone.
Every bit of his grey down that is shed
is a part of his childhood disappearing.
The itching obsesses him.
He must go through this strange ritual of metamorphosis
where he gradually divests himself of his childhood coat
to reveal his new plumage.
The little emperor leaves Oamock
and sets out for the ocean having never seen it.
It's clear that he doesn't yet know what to do.
The adults are sliding on their bellies; why not do the same?
And so a simple game
takes the little emperor away from the colony forever.
He will never go back: something is calling him.
The youngsters have never walked on the ice floe,
and yet they are instinctively forming columns.
Of course, they've seen adults walking like that,
but who is leading them?
They've been gone for two days.
Hunger drives the little emperor and his companions,
who, until then, had been fed generously by their parents.
The wind picks up:
a new ordeal.
But the emperor and his companions don't even slow down.
In the memory of these hikers there is a tenacity for life
which matches the storms in which they were born.
It's remarkable how surprised they are by the sight of the ocean.
Their gait becomes more hesitant.
Everyone seems to want to look forward.
Everything is new: the smell of salt, the sound of the waves.
So this is the ocean!
In the air they find flavours that remind them of their first meals.
The waves hypnotize them.
Who will go first?
Of course the adults dive into the water,
but how to do like them?
They see the movements of their cousins, the Adélie penguins,
who hurriedly leave to join their colony for the short summer.
For three days they hesitate.
Hunger is gnawing at their stomachs.
No-one has ever taught them how to dive, swim or fish.
Ignorant of the ocean's dangers, they know nothing of their prey.
Like butterflies emerging from their chrysalis,
the little emperor and his companions open their wings
and instinctively fly into the sea.
Like experienced divers, they hold their breath
and discover the hidden side of the ocean, for the first time.
It will take the little emperor 5 years of solitary learning
before he can take up the torch of a life
as full as his father's.
But one day, these little emperors will surely hear the call
that will bring them back to Oamock
and they will continue this story which, with our goodwill,
will lead them to the end of time.