“Do you guys even like penguins?” documentary filmmaker Lloyd Fales asked the ebullient crowd of Middle School students, whose reactions at a recent assembly ranged from joy to sympathy to surprise.

 

Fales, who came to Spence at the invitation of his friend Sarah Lederman, history teacher and Middle School Dean of Life and Leadership, shared his 2008 movie, Return to Penguin City, about penguins at Cape Crozier in Antarctica.

 

Lederman introduced Fales, noting his family connection to film and birds: his father was a documentary filmmaker for public broadcasting and his mother was a volunteer at Audubon. Fales studied film in college and his first job was with a biologist who was working with swans. His film ended up on National Geographic TV, and since then, he has made more films featuring puffins, crows and dogs.

 

Fales told the students about spending a month in Antarctica with scientists whose research on penguins was funded by the National Science Foundation. Their focus was on Adélie and Emperor penguin colonies, which have experienced dramatic changes to their environment as a result of climate change. Cape Crozier is one of the largest Adélie breeding colonies in the world; around 200,000 pairs of penguins live there, Fales said.

 

Return to Penguin City solicited almost constant verbal reactions from the students who collectively “aww”-ed when the penguins waddled or slid on the ice. Students gasped when they saw mummified penguins from a site scientists studied to find out the cause of their widespread mortality, and they expressed frustration over a bird finding and eating a penguin egg. When a penguin escaped the jaws of a leopard seal, the students cheered.

 

The movie follows a 10-year-old female named Roxanne—one of the penguins tagged by the scientists. Using nest markers, flipper bands and special transmitters attached to the penguins’ backs, the scientists determine the birds’ location, the time and depth of their dives and the temperature of the water they swam in. The film also addresses Iceberg B-15, the world’s largest recorded iceberg, which broke from the Ross Ice Shelf and blocked the entrance to the penguin food supply in the ocean and hurt the Adélie and Emperor penguin populations.

 

After students watched a portion of the movie, Fales took questions from the audience; students asked Fales how long he was in Antarctica, what he wore and where he slept. One student asked how penguins adapted to humans.

 

“Because humans have never been there until relatively recently, penguins had a couple million years to adapt with no humans, so they’re not afraid of people,” Fales explained. “In fact, they’ll come up and follow you and check you out.”

 

With lots of hands still in the air by the end of the assembly, Lederman offered to pass along students’ additional questions to Fales via email. One student remarked, “I want a penguin.”