Emperor Penguins Speed Launch Out of the Water | National Geographic

I originally proposed the story to National Geographic about emperor penguins. I wanted to really connect the readers of National Geographic to this this bird that can swim with such capability that it's hard to comprehend. We're here off of Cape Washington, Antarctica in the Ross Sea. The penguins are going to sea to feed and they'll be gone anywhere from 10 days to three weeks and then they'll return back to the colonies. So you have a constant parade of penguins leaving and penguins returning. So we wanted to look at this relationship between this exit strategy they have, this coating themselves in bubbles and how they avoid leprosy predation. I didn't want to appear as a predator to these penguins when they returned from the open sea and so I locked my legs under the ice and I waited. And all of a sudden I had these four foot long 80 pound penguins all around me. I had an emperor penguin crawl up on my head, on my back, onto the ice and I knew it was going to go well. And as I'm lying there I start to see these penguins come rocketing up from the depths and their backs are facing me as they rocket up towards this open hole in the ice and as they're doing that it's like somebody turned on a jet and the bubbles just start pouring off these penguins. They release bubbles from their crown, from their belly, from their back and they essentially create a tunnel of air around themselves that would allow them to triple their speed when they exit the water. I knew that I needed to photograph this behavior from the surface as well. You'd be pointing your camera here waiting and 10 penguins would come off to your right, six to the left, you know one would fly over you. So it was extremely hard to get. It actually became quite comical when you have 300 penguins coming out of the water and they fly so high into the air and when they land on their bellies they knock the air out of themselves. We felt a little bit sorry for them but they were okay and this is what they're designed to do. So we are there just lying on the edge of the ice and it's amazing that the penguins know that we're not a threat, that we're not something that can hurt them and they're nervous of us at the start but they get used to us very quickly. I was mesmerized by the beauty, the agility of these birds, the speed, the grace and the power and the control that they had over their environment when and when not to release bubbles. It was one of the coolest things I've definitely seen in my career.