Yesterday I believed that marching penguins couldn’t possibly be riveting cinema but I have changed my opinion after watching this film. I actually picked it up from the library for the kids but they headed out to my in-laws for the week without watching it so I sat down with a magazine and turned it on figuring I’d glance at it every so often as I turned pages. I didn’t read a page.
Certainly, not everybody finds these birds in tuxedos amusing but you will think that they’re downright heroic after watching this movie. Penguins are the sole inhabitants of the most inhospitable piece of real estate in the world – Antartica. They apparently missed the proverbial boat to being a warm climate species when the continents drifted apart aeons ago. Simply living in Antartica is unbelievable survival story in and of itself but the yearly lifecycle of these birds makes the travail orders of magnitude more difficult and impressive.
Emperor penguins (the bigger guys) live almost exclusively in the water for the first 5 years of their life until their biological clock strikes the ‘mating hour’. Then they pop out of the water en masse and march approximately 70 miles across Antarctic snow and ice to the very same mating ground where they were born. The penguin mating rituals aren’t especially dramatic since they mostly just waddle and slide when they’re on land. Females outnumber males so there is some minor bickering for partners but none of the usual macho stuff that one might associate with nature movies about other species.
After a brief mating period they hang around awhile until the egg is laid. The gestation process takes its toll on mom – she loses half her body weight – so she passes the egg to dad without it touching the ice for more than a brief moment. Dad props the egg up on top of his feet and drops a flap of his stomach over it as a blanket and waves goodbye to mom who will be gone for over 3 months. I think the calculation in the film is that dad doesn’t eat for something like 125 days straight while the mom is away. Mom has to march 70 miles back to the sea to fatten herself up so that she can walk back again a feed the newly hatched penguin before it starves or freezes.
Human beings believe that we sacrifice a lot for our children, however, if you watch the footage of what these penguins endure to reproduce you will be humbled and astounded. The male penguins have to be the toughest guys on the planet. The males huddle together in a huge scrum, without fighting, taking turns rotating from the warmer middle part of the grouping to the outside, all without allowing the egg to roll off of their feet. They don’t walk around except to waddle to a change in position – they mostly just stand still and wait. It is an amazing feat – the weather makes you shiver just watching the movie. Finally, the moms return (if they’re not eaten by a seal or die from the hardships of the journey) and dad finally gets to march back to the sea for some grub.
This movie is a quiet testimony to one of the most incredible stories of adaptation in the animal world. As I watched the males sit there in these incredible storms I kept asking myself, what are these guys thinking? These male penguins demonstrate a stoic commitment to fatherhood that is just incredible. Oddly, I didn’t really think too much about how this movie was filmed because the penguins’ story was so engaging but during the credits there were snippets of the film makers and they have got to be a tough bunch too – I get chilled when the weather drops below 60!!
If you have very young children there are some bits where an egg is frozen, an old penguin perishes, a leopard seal carries off a penguin underwater. These parts were sad but not gory so I wouldn’t think that this movie is likely to cause any nightmares. ‘The March of the Penguins’ is a great nature film and I highly recommend it.
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