Emperor of the Ice by Nicola Davies
Nicola Davies needs little introduction to the world of children’s literature. She is well known for her beautiful books and for raising environmental awareness. Emperor of the Ice is a new book highlighting the harsh lives of penguins but there is hope to be found as well.
Life is tough for breeding Emperor penguins. We’ve all seen the footage of the males shuffling about with an egg balanced on their feet in the middle of an Antarctic blizzard. Evolution it seems has dealt them the harshest and most bonkers card, that of trying to rear a youngster in the middle of the most hideously cruel weather on earth. Surely a bit of global warming would be good news for them? Sadly, it’s more complicated than that, because what the climate crisis delivers isn’t a kinder climate, but a more unpredictable one, and this unpredictability has had a direct effect on Emperor penguins’ ability to breed successfully.
Emperor penguins arrive at their breeding colonies on the coast just as every other species is leaving to escape the cruellest season. What Emperors need is ice, the solid platform of frozen sea that forms around the Antarctic continent in Winter. It will keep their eggs and chicks safe and dry whilst giving the adults access to their underwater feeding grounds. But it takes a long time to rear a full-grown Emperor penguin weighing 23 kilos and standing up to 1.3 metres tall. So the ice must last from April through to December, when the full-grown chicks finally lose their fluffy romper suits and gain a coat of waterproof feathers. Climate change makes the ice thinner and storms stronger, which means the ice under the feet of fledgling chicks can break, tipping whole colonies into the water to drown.
It doesn’t sound much like good material for a children’s picture book does it? But wait, the aim of my book with Catherine Rayner, Emperor of the Ice, was to tell a positive story about how species cope with the problems that climate change throws at them, even when that ‘problem’ constitutes a catastrophe. In 2016 over 10,000 Emperor penguin chicks died when the ice under the Halley Bay colony broke up in an unseasonable storm. It was an utter disaster and seemed to bode very ill for the future of Emperor penguins. But when scientists used satellites to look down on the remotest parts of the Antarctic ice the following winter, they found something surprising: colonies of Emperor penguins at other locations had grown and small new colonies had sprung up. It looked like the bereaved and traumatised adults from Halley Bay had simply set up somewhere else.
This doesn’t mean that Emperors are out of danger and we must do all that we can to reduce the other problems which human activity has created. We must protect the Southern Ocean, where they feed, from over fishing, pollution and disturbance, while we reset our planet’s thermostat by reducing carbon emissions. Emperors have shown us that their toughness and resilience runs deep and with our help it may run deep enough for them to weather the storm of climate chaos.
Emperor of the Ice is published by Walker Books and is available now.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.