Under no circumstances was I to contact the penguin scientist.

These orders, direct from the National Science Foundation, posed an immediate problem. My dual mission in traveling to the southernmost continent was to research a children’s novel and to interview local folks working there. Not only would it be unconscionable to exclude penguins from a children’s book about Antarctica, but also David Ainley, one of the world’s renowned experts on penguins, is from the Bay Area.

As I sat in the rarefied atmosphere of the San Francisco Public Library’s History Center, waiting for Captain Cook’s volumes about his voyages south, I pondered this obstacle. As a National Science Foundation Artist & Writer grantee, I would be a temporary guest in the land of science, and I had been warned that I would have to be extremely patient, polite, and respectful of the scientists I would meet. Apparently problems in the past with artists or writers had only fed the scientists’ perceptions of us as prima donnas. I suspected that Ainley had been saddled with a particularly difficult artist or writer and was simply fed up. I could understand that. We are a difficult bunch. I was determined to prove myself otherwise.

The librarian handed me a musty old volume with brown leather covers. The paper was powdery, nearly coming apart in my careful hands. When I read on the first page the date, MDCCLXXIII, and the words: "An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the South Hemisphere," I burst into tears.

What did the penguins really matter?! I was going to see the Antarctic continent that Captain Cook, bless his explorer’s heart, never even saw. He wrote: "It is true, however, that the greatest part of this Southern continent (supposing there is one), must lie within the polar circle, where the sea is so pestered with ice, that the land is thereby inaccessible. The risk one runs in exploring a coast, in these unknown and icy seas, is so very great, that I can be bold enough to say that no man will ever venture farther than I have done; and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored."

Ha! Step aside, Captain Cook. At least that was one mystery I didn’t have to solve. I knew with all certainty that there was a southern continent.

However, I did realize in that moment, holding those old volumes of Cook’s, that perhaps my mission to Antarctica was a little more complicated than I had originally believed. Sure, I would interview East Bay scientists and gather data for a novel. But these were only my direct missions. Like any traveler, my real mission was much more elusive and also much more motivating. I only had to figure out what it was.

Luckily, the NSF issued me the auspicious grantee number of WO-007, which I was to use at all times when referring to myself. Lucy Bledsoe, 007–I liked the sound. McMurdo Station, the American base in Antarctica, was until very recently run by the United States Navy. Now the NSF is in charge. As a writer, a fiction writer no less, I was going to be a bit like a parrot in the land of penguins. No doubt about it, I would have to go undercover.

Easier said than done. From the moment I boarded the US Air Force LC-130 bound for McMurdo Station, everyone I encountered seemed to know exactly who I was: this year’s writer. Having asked permission of the load master to ride in the cockpit, I viewed much of our approach to Antarctica from that vantage. First ice floes began appearing in the sea; then they merged and soon became a sheet of ice. Finally, the continent itself heaved into view, the glorious Transantarctic Mountains snaking their way along the western coast of the Ross Ice Shelf.

By now I was wearing the headset the crew used to communicate with one another, and they entertained themselves by pretending that they were lost and wondering how they might make an emergency landing on that raw, frozen landscape. All for the benefit of me, the presumably daffy writer. But even I recognized Mt. Erebus, the active volcano on Ross Island, with its perfect plume of smoke on this clear day. And soon I set foot, finally, on the Antarctic continent.

Right off, I attended the mandatory survival school at the base of Mount Erebus, where I dug a snow cave and slept in it, skied solo in the middle of the night with fog swirling around my feet, and learned how to locate an unconscious cohort in a blizzard. Then I settled into my office in the state-of-the-art Crary Lab, the heart of McMurdo Station where all the scientists have their offices and laboratories. Diplomatically, carefully, my plan was to interview as many scientists as I could, and hopefully visit their field camps. I had already set up several such expeditions, but still had time open in my schedule. I skulked about the lab and McMurdo Station, getting a feel for the place, and working up my nerve to introduce myself to people.

On my second day in McMurdo, I was leaving Crary Lab as a nice-looking man was entering the building. He wore the big red NSF parka with his name posted above the breast. David Ainley. The penguin scientist. The man who should not, under any circumstances, be contacted. I had expected someone much more imposing. In fact, he seemed shy and had a pleasant, unassuming manner. I passed him three more times before I dared speak to him. When I finally told him about my project, he graciously agreed to tell me more about his penguin research.

When not on the ice studying penguins, David Ainley works on seabird projects around San Francisco Bay, including monitoring the disposal of dredge from Oakland Harbor, which gets carted away to a spot twenty miles west of the Farallons. Ainley investigates the effects of this dumping on the marine sanctuary.

He first began studying penguins in 1968, and has since made 21 trips to the ice. "Studying penguins is a long effort," Ainley explained. "A songbird lives just a couple of years. The fact that penguins live so long means it takes a much longer commitment." His book, Breeding Biology of the Adélie Penguin, coauthored with Robert LeResche and William J.L. Sladen and published by the University of California Press, explores the demographics of Adélie penguins and is one of the first-ever studies of penguin behavior.

Ainley is currently studying Adélie colony dynamics, focusing on the four colonies at Cape Royds, Cape Bird, Beaufort Island, and Cape Crozier. He is trying to understand the relationship between sea ice and breeding places. "One of the gems of this season," Ainley told me, "was discovering birds from other colonies in new colonies. There is a pretty good exchange between the Royds birds and the Bird birds."

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