What can Penguins teach us about love?

Two years ago, travel writer Peter John Watson went to one of the remotest places on Earth to take up one of the strangest jobs imaginable. For three months, his home would be Goudier Island, a fragment of rock the size of Trafalgar Square located 200 miles north of the Antarctic Circle. The nearest town is 700 miles away. His mission: to count gentoo penguins on behalf of the British Antarctic Survey.

Watson’s first introduction to the gentoos is the overwhelming noise. They are toddler-sized, with orange beaks, rosy feet and a spray of white feathers across their heads. On land they are comically ungainly but in the water they are a marvel, the fastest underwater birds on Earth, diving to a depth of 650ft. Watson is instantly smitten by them.

Arriving just before Christmas, he is in time to observe them ‘pebbling’. During courtship, the male penguin carefully selects a smooth pebble which he solemnly presents to the female for her approval, until gradually the pair build up a pebbly nest on which they can keep their eggs dry and insulated.

Watson, who started a new relationship just before leaving for the Antarctic, can’t help but see this gentle mating ritual as an act of love: ‘No grand declarations or lavish spectacle. Just a steady accumulation of small gestures.’ Perhaps, he reflects, this is exactly how love should be.

As the chicks start hatching, he and the handful of other people at the base have the tricky task of counting them as they nestle underneath their parents. This survey brings him into contact with Aggie, the island’s grumpiest penguin, who regards all humans as a personal insult and has a ferocious bite. Aggie has worked out that ‘if she timed it right, she could land a perfectly placed snap into the softest part behind the knee’.

A second survey, after the chicks have left the nest, shows that a quarter of the original number have died, either having been snatched by predators or fallen off cliffs. Looking at these ‘tough, scruffy, charming, maddening little survivors’, Watson feels the loss of the dead ones keenly. These were ‘my chicks’.

Watson writes with great brio and you feel as if you are right there on this remote island with him, getting used to the constant smell of guano, carefully picking your way along the paths to avoid the clusters of penguins.

Previously he craved adventure, but these lovable birds give him a new outlook on life. ‘Everything I could ever want was waiting for me back in England,’ he realises. ‘All I had to do was stop chasing the next thing long enough to notice what was already there.’