 |
| Photo by Christopher Michel, Flickr creative commons |
'Masters of endurance, they weather the coldest and windiest habitat on earth - they are the only penguin that shows no territorial aggression, having realised that in order to survive personal space is a luxury they cannot afford. They live through storms of hurricane-force winds and temperatures as low as minus 70 degrees C, leading Apsley Cherry-Garrard to observe that in his opinion no creature on earth has a worse time.'
'I wondered if there at the end of the earth I might learn something from the emperors, of the purity of living in the physical senses, of a life without tangles of motives or the radio-chatter of the mind. They seemed to offer a welcome all too rare in the natural world, perhaps even a kind of forgiveness.'
Gavin Francis, 2012, Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins
