大象传媒

The place that really encapsulated the struggles facing the creatures that choose to live in Patagonia’s desert was Punta Tombo’s Magellanic penguin colony.

It’s a weird place and somewhere you definitely would not expect to find a penguin. It looks like the surface of the moon, it’s boiling hot and it’s blasted by wind and sand. Yet this is the biggest penguin colony in South America. As far as the eye can see are a series of hills, every inch of which has been mined by the penguins.

For the film, Punta Tombo’s penguin colony was to be the culmination of a journey that started in the Andes Mountains a thousand miles away. The mountains have created the desert conditions by blocking moist clouds, creating a vast rain shadow. The penguins are the most spectacular example of a creature taking the very best aspects of the desert and exploiting it to survive and prosper in a seemingly inhospitable place.

The reason the penguins come here and suffer in the heat is to keep their chicks warm. It sounds crazy given they are covered in fluffy down and this is a boiling desert, but at night it gets cold and if the chicks’ down gets wet, it sticks together and they die of hypothermia. This is the only place they can bank on it not raining.

We visited at a special time of year; there were chicks all over the place. Some were hatching, some in the nest and others beginning to waddle about. It gave us the best chance to film as much behaviour as possible.

Getting around Punta Tombo however was really tricky. The penguins had dug so many burrows that the soil was like swiss cheese. So cameraman John Brown and I relied on the help of the Punta Tombo rangers to make sure we didn’t step in the wrong place and crash through a burrow uninvited.

Once we were up and running, we had the chance to see the place from a penguin’s point of view… basically, it’s a furnace. As if the heat isn’t bad enough, the wind can whip up out of nowhere, sandblasting people and kit with ferocious and sometimes gaspingly hot gusts. More than once our hide was blown away and the kit was filthy after every day.

There’s no doubt that Punta Tombo could be a challenging place to live and work, but it had another side. For me, the best time of the day was the evening. The winds generally subsided as the sun began to set, and this was when most of the penguins made it back to their nests. Magellanics are known for their distinctive calls (not a million miles from the bray of a donkey) and when the lifelong pairs came together after being apart at sea, they rattled their bills and indulged in a loving serenade.

One pair is impressive, but the whole colony rivals any Welsh choir.

The one lingering memory I will cherish from my time filming in Patagonia was staying out late on one such magic evening to capture the sounds of the colony in full voice. Just me and a million penguins singing to the Patagonian wilderness.