The Penguins of Bertha’s Beach

The journey itself felt unlike any ordinary consultancy trip. I travelled south via Ascension Island on a Royal Air Force flight, and still remember the unusual sight of instructions about firearms being secured in the aircraft hold rather than carried in the passenger cabin.

Arriving at Mount Pleasant brought the scale of the military environment into focus. Its long internal corridor system was known as the “Death Star”, connecting accommodation, messes and welfare spaces: a gym, swimming pool, cinema, shops, bowling alley and more. It was an extraordinary enclosed world set against a vast, cold and open island landscape.

Part of the work gave me the opportunity to travel around sections of the islands by military helicopter, assessing coastal areas relevant to contingency planning. From above, the South Atlantic landscape made immediate ecological sense: dark kelp beds in clear water, white beaches, open grassland, dunes, wetlands and a coastline that seemed to go on forever.

As a marine ecologist, I was struck by how little separation there was between land and sea. Kelp, shore, dune, wetland and birdlife were not individual subjects on a map; they were one living coastal system.

I set out alone towards the Gentoo colony, wearing a complete survival suit because the conditions were brutally cold. I had told people where I was going and when I expected to return. The walk was roughly 3.5 to 4 kilometres along the beach, with the wind coming hard off the South Atlantic.

One sight has stayed with me: shallow pools left by the tide where seawater had frozen. Saltwater freezes at a lower temperature than freshwater, which made it all the more striking to see. I had never experienced anything quite like it.

Then I began to see Gentoo penguins in the distance. Some were swimming in the surf, coming ashore and then returning to the water. As I walked, a few seemed to swim ahead and reappear further along the beach. It felt as though they were keeping an eye on me.

When some birds ran ahead along the shore, my unscientific interpretation was simple: “Quick — Rowan’s coming. Let’s leg it.” It was, of course, my own joke about what I was seeing, not a claim about penguin conversation.

I sat and lay quietly in the grass and dunes in my survival suit, watching the colony get on with its business. The suit and my clothes became covered in penguin droppings. My hands were freezing, my fingers were painfully cold and working the camera became difficult. I did not care in the slightest.

I was completely absorbed: calling birds, nesting birds, social interactions, movement between colony and sea, birds watching me and others moving away. From where I was standing, two penguins looked almost as though they were holding flippers as they faced the sea. It was one of those small photographic moments that never leaves you.

The return walk took me back along the frozen pools, kelp, dunes and open shore, survival suit still on and hands still cold. I remember the isolation and the wind more than any single detail, and how fortunate I felt to have been given such a private encounter.

I had travelled thousands of miles from home for work. Yet the experience that stayed with me was simply being a visitor in the penguins’ world: white sand, freezing wind, the South Atlantic, kelp on the strandline, the noise of the colony and thousands of Gentoo penguins going about their lives. You can plan an assignment, a survey and the logistics. You cannot plan the moment when a wild landscape stops being something you are studying and becomes something you are simply experiencing. Bertha’s Beach was one of those moments for me.