First, you hear them. It is almost the sound of Canada geese, not quite cattle. More than anything, it is the sound of New Year's Eve: long, cheap plastic trumpets, hundreds going at once. The landscape holds no clues to the sound's origins. This is desert, a wind-harried patch of Patagonia called Punta Tombo, 750 miles south of Buenos Aires. You would never guess the noise coming out of this bright, hot, arid South American wasteland is the noise of 500,000 penguins, the largest mainland breeding colony of Magellanic penguins on Earth.
Most people don't know that Magellanic penguins bray or that they live in temperate climes (as do four of 17 penguin species). Most people, including biologists, don't know much about these birds. The bulk of what is known has been discovered by one woman, penguin specialist Dee Boersma. Boersma holds a teaching post in the zoology department of the University of Washington in order to carry out her research at Punta Tombo, which she has done every year for the past 19 years. The Magellanic Penguin Project is one of the world's largest studies of avian life— with 4,000 birds banded at any given time— and one of the longest running. It's the Harvard Nurses Study of birds.
Nearly a fourth of the Magellanic penguins in Patagonia nest at Punta Tombo, but their numbers are dropping by an average of 2.5 percent a year.
Boersma's single-minded persistence is more than equaled by her subjects'. Each April, they leave the security of their Punta Tombo bushes and burrows and embark on the lengthiest flightless migration of any bird— a seven-month journey up the coast of South America and back in pursuit of food. Streams of them come in at Punta Tombo every afternoon, pulling up at the exact same spot every time, as though it were a subway exit with a sidewalk leading up to the beach and into the colony. The following dawn, tiny suits make their way back down that same invisible sidewalk and into the sea again.
