What do you call a bunch of penguins anyway? I mean like two hundred Adelies that wander in from Cape Royds and walk right up to you and then settle in for a nap. What do you call that? Besides cute, that is.

Official sources say the correct collective noun for a collection of spheniciforms is as follows: if they are in the water, they are a raft. On land, a waddle. The aliterative alternaitves passel and parcel do not differentiate location. A creche is likewise independent of water or land, but given that it refers to young animals, it is most aptly used at a rookery–which is the proper nominclature for a place where penguin chicks are reared.

It was a fine Sunday afternoon in McMurdo. The Swedish icebreaker Oden had just broken out a shipping lane from the ice edge about 20 miles north of Hut Point so that a chanel of open water lead right into Winter Quarters Bay–perhaps that is what brought them, a horde of juvenile Adelie penguins, clamoring in ardent parcels to investigate what for all appearances they mistook for a colony of unusually tall, strangely colored penguins.

They clambored up from the sea ice in waddles of fifty at a time to stand in awkward looking gawking groups at our feet. After a few moments, they settled in. Some lay down, others squabbled, a few picked up rocks, and one even napped.

And so there they were, and there we were, lying around on the volcanic gravel shores of Ross Island in some cases within a meter or so of each other. They were not selling Coca-cola or children’s toys, and there was no intermediating voice-over to anthropomorphize their actions (though occasional peels of laughter from, our side conveyed that we humans tend to interpret their behavior by our own social constructs). I don’t know what they thought of us, or why they stayed for nearly three hours, or what made them, collectively, in one long streaming waddle, and then as a raft, go back to wherever they came from. Call it what you like, it was an Antarctic moment I won’t forget.