Original subtitles

The pounding surf of the great southern ocean

beating on the rocks of South Georgia.

Few creatures, you might think, could survive it.

But Macaroni penguins are desperate to get ashore.

Their flippers are of little help out of water.

All they have to give them a grip on these slippery rocks

are small claws on their feet.

Now, at the end of summer,

life is becoming increasingly difficult

for these Macaroni penguins struggling to feed their chicks,

that are almost fully grown and have massive appetites.

With the approach of autumn, the weather will worsen.

Massive depressions rush around the fringes of the Antarctic continent,

creating huge gales with gusts of over 100 miles an hour

and lash the sea into a frenzy.

Before long, the temperatures will drop to below freezing

and then all the wildlife of Antartica will be engaged

in a desperate race to complete breeding

before the ice closes everything down.

In the deep south, the sea has stayed frozen all summer.

Penguins here face an even greater challenge,

for this is where the door closes first.

Here at Cape Royds, I'm 1,400 miles closer to the pole,

and this Adelie colony

is the most southerly nesting group of any penguins anywhere.

The summer here is very short indeed

and these penguins have to breed very swiftly to be successful.

They're well ahead of the Macaronis up in the north

and the chicks are already losing their down.

Beneath the woolly coat lies the waterproof layer of feathers

that will protect them in the icy southern seas.

The season is so short that things have to move fast.

Over a mere two weeks,

the jam-packed colony virtually empties

as the newly-feathered young follow their parents to the sea

to make their first encounter with water.

And their first swim will not be easy.

The bay is filled with surging, sharp-edged brash ice.

Even getting down to the water poses problems.

Soon the edge of the sea is thronged by apprehensive youngsters,

nervously waiting for someone to take the plunge.

The brash is so thick and extensive

that, on its seaward side,

adults returning with food for their chicks can't get through.

They turn back.

The hungry youngsters now have little alternative.

They have to get to sea to feed.

In fact, it's easier for them to cross the brash than for their parents.

Being significantly lighter and more buoyant,

they can skitter across the surface of the broken ice.

But moving so slowly and so clumsily

puts them in real danger.

(PANICKED CHIRPING)

A leopard seal.

The majority of the chicks make it to open water,

where they are a little safer.

The leopard seal stays with its victim.

This game of cat and mouse goes on for 20 minutes.

Like so many other large predators on land and sea,

the leopard seal seems to feel no urgency to complete its kill.

At last, the penguin is dead.

Now the process of stripping off its flesh begins.

The carcass drifts down to the sea floor.

But it won't be wasted.

A nemeteme worm, a metre long.

It has detected the taste of penguin flesh

drifting through the cold water.

Another scavenger arrives -

a giant isopod, 10 centimetres long,

the equivalent of crabs in warmer waters.

The isopod strips off the meat with its hooked legs and strong jaws.

The worm just turns its stomach inside out and envelops the food.

Within hours, the carcass is covered

by a writhing tangle of worms.

Within days, there is nothing left

but bare bones.

The first snows of winter have fallen.

The last chicks to hatch are doomed.

Their parents have to abandon them

before they are fully grown.

The adults must go to sea to build up their strength

before returning to the colony for one last ordeal before winter - the moult.

All penguins need a new coat of feathers for the winter,

which means shedding the old one.

So colonies right around the continent

fill with shed feathers.

On Deception Island,

Chinstrap penguins stand silent and motionless.

Only a month ago,

these steep slopes of volcanic ash

were noisy with the squawks of 80,000 pairs of them coming and going

and caring for their chicks.

Now they have little energy to spare.

They can't go to sea with their coats in this condition, so they can't feed.

For three weeks, they stand fasting,

losing half their body weight,

but at the end they will have warm, watertight coats

and be ready for the icy blasts of winter.

(RAGING WIND)

By the end of March, most of them have left,

and the remainder are on the move, making their way

across the emptying slopes back to the sea.

Escape to the north, to open seas,

is the driving force - to move where the food should be.

But the obstacles are formidable.

At minus 1.9 degrees centigrade,

the sea begins to freeze.

A slight swell on the surface produces "pancake" ice.

In the frigid air,

the ice above water grows into crystals.

The early explorers called these fantastic shapes

"ice flowers".

As it gets colder and colder,

the ice thickens.

On the coast, it freezes fast to the margins of the land.

Farther out, the pack ice consolidates into sea ice.

The belt of ice surrounding the continent widens,

advancing north two miles a day

and driving life before it.

But the ice front has not yet reached all the islands

and there are still some that can provide a refuge for wildlife

well into autumn.

Here on South Georgia,

we are on the northern edge of Antarctica.

You can be fairly sure that the sea here won't freeze over.

Only once or twice a century does it do so.

This floating ice has all fallen from the glacier behind me.

But although at 54 degrees south we are as far away from the South Pole

as Britain is from the North,

the immense ice cap of Antarctica still dominates the climate.

Glaciers cover over half the island.

They blanket many of the peaks,

the tallest of which are 2,700 metres high,

and in some places they run right down into the sea.

During the winter, the temperature falls

to minus 10 degrees at the coast,

so the need for animals to complete their breeding

in the short summer season

is still very intense.

Two million fur seals come here to breed,

and, at the end of summer,

the beaches are thronged with young pups and their mothers.

The pups suckle for four months, until late March.

That's longer than the fur seals

that live in the warmer waters further north.

It's a measure of how strong young animals have to be

if they are to survive down here.

A pup, to get all the milk that is its due,

has to recognise its mother's call

when she returns from feeding at sea

and is ready to provide a feed.

(LOUD HIGH- PITCHED CALL)

Three months earlier, this shore was a battlefield

as the bulls fought for the right to dominate this stretch of beach,

and all the females on it.

Now the mating has finished and the bulls have gone to sea.

Only the pups are left,

testing their strength with mock fights.

Many of these youngsters

will not survive their first year.

The weaker ones will not get enough food.

There will be accidents.

There will be orphans.

By the end of the breeding season,

corpses lie scattered over the beach,

food for skuas and giant petrels.

(LOUD SCREECHING)

The petrels, with their great hooked beaks,

are usually the first to rip open a carcass.

They are Antarctica's equivalent of Africa's vultures.

Their huge wings are two metres across.

But, unlike vultures, they don't just scavenge.

They will tackle young penguins and small sea birds

while they are still alive.

The whalers in the old days

used to call them "gluttons".

It's easy to see why.

And their dirtiness gave them another nickname too - "stinkers".

Surprisingly, there are ducks at this feast, too.

These are the South Georgia pintails.

Alone among ducks,

they have acquired a regular taste for meat.

An elephant seal wallow.

This is an all-female gathering.

They clearly like one another's company,

for they congregate in great assemblies.

But they can on occasion get irritated with one another.

(LOW GROWLING)

Like the penguins, they went to sea

after rearing their young,

fed intensively to put on the weight they lost during breeding,

and now they have come back in order to moult.

Large chunks of skin and hair

peel off their bodies,

and it seems to make them very tetchy.

It takes a month for them to grow new coats.

Then, as the temperatures fall still lower and winter closes in,

they will return to the place where they are most at home -

the sea.

Grey-headed albatross also nest on South Georgia,

but they stay a little longer.

The waters are still ice-free,

so they can catch food for their young

well into autumn.

An adult bird caring for its chick

may travel 600 miles or more to find food,

which it brings back in its crop.

That was a squid, and very nice, too.

Above the grey-heads, another kind of albatross -

the largest sea bird in the world,

with a three metre wing-span -

the wandering albatross.

It nests a little further inland

on South Georgia's meadows and ridges of tussock grass.

In marked contrast to the other birds,

that have almost finished their breeding and are preparing to leave,

this wandering albatross has come to start a courtship

that may take two or three years.

(SCREECHING)

These young birds have spent the first three years

of their adult life at sea.

Now they've returned to the colony where they were reared

and are starting to look for a partner.

They do this by taking part in dancing parties.

Young unmated birds

court like this for several years

before they decide who their partners shall be

and together start work on a nest mound.

But as the winter sets in and its icy door closes,

the young albatross too have to return to sea.

The sea won't freeze here around South Georgia,

but as the sun moves north and the days darken,

the temperature of the ocean falls lower still

and life in the water becomes increasingly scarce.

The huge shoals of krill disperse

and for the seabirds, food becomes more and more difficult to find.

By April, winter storms are beginning to sweep across the Antarctic.

The winds rise to above 100 miles an hour.

The temperature falls to 70 degrees below zero.

And then the sea freezes.

The door has shut.

Throughout the winter, the ice continues to advance northwards.

The area it covers

increases at the rate of 40,000 square miles every day.

Before the winter is over,

it will have almost doubled the size of the continent.

Now, at the end of autumn,

practically all the wildlife has escaped to the north.

The whales have gone to find warmer waters in which to breed.

The seals, albatrosses and most of the penguins

have also gone out to sea,

though no one as yet is sure exactly where.

But there is one truly remarkable creature

that seems to turn all these rules upside-down -

the Emperor penguin.

Largest of all the penguins,

the Emperor stands over a metre high

and weighs on average 33 kilos.

Most creatures are forced by the worsening weather

to retreat north to warmer latitudes,

but the Emperors are gathering at the ice edge

to start travelling into the deep south,

where they will mate and rear their young.

Now the Emperors start their long march -

maybe tens of miles -

to reach their traditional nesting site on the sea ice.

In the next programme, we'll follow them

and see, with temperatures dropping to minus 70 centigrade,

how life in the freezer faces the ultimate challenge -

the Antarctic winter.

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