On the challenges of filming penguins

BG: Penguins don’t just live in Antarctica, but Antarctica is probably the hardest place to film them. We spent two and a half months camping next to an emperor penguin colony. We could see the penguins, hear the penguins, smell the penguins 24 hours a day — magic. However, one of the key things we wanted to show was how the chicks survive storms growing up. Of course, if you’re going to film a chick in a storm, that means you have to be in the storm too. We had one storm that got real crazy and it ended up ripping almost all of our tents and they filled with snow, so we had to enact our emergency plan, which involved bailing out to an old South African research station that was essentially two abandoned shipping containers welded together on the ice. We slept in those containers for six days, waiting for this relentless storm to pass. And what really occurred to me during that time, when we were bored and cold, was that the penguins have been out in this. They have no tent, they have no shipping container; they just take it. We expected, going back to the colony, that there would be dead penguins everywhere, and they were just like, “Hey, what’s up? Yeah, that sucked.” That’s just life for them. They’re so tough. 

On surprises during filming

PB: In the third chapter of the series, we filmed penguin couples in the Falkland Islands, where each partner belonged to a completely different species — macaroni penguins and rockhopper penguins. Normally, when these hybrid couples breed, the eggs don’t hatch or the chicks don’t survive, but that wasn’t the case here. The eggs hatched, the chicks survived, and we saw hybrids breeding with other hybrids, and hybrids breeding [with one of the two initial species]. When you study evolution, hybridization is one way new species appear. To be able to see that in person and film that for the first time was fantastic. I literally say we are witnessing evolution before our eyes. 

BG: I thought I knew penguins before I started. I was so wrong. Just when I thought they’d hit the limit and that was the end, they’d find a way to make it through. In filming the emperor penguins, we were filming the chicks taking their first swim. At five months old, they’re abandoned by their parents, and something deep down inside them says, I need to go and find the ocean. And even though they’ve never been there and there’s no one who’s been there before to show them, they find it. They then take their first swim by jumping off of sea ice, which is usually a one- or two-foot-high drop, but we followed this one group of chicks who took a wrong turn on their way to the sea and found themselves at the top of a 50-foot ice cliff. We were thinking, “What the heck are they gonna do here?” One of the chicks was a bit braver than the others; it jumped off and the rest soon followed. This had never been filmed before, so lots of people have assumed that this is a new thing. I don’t think so. I think they’ve been doing this for millions of years and it’s just that we’ve now got the technology to film it.