Waiting to Fly: My Escapades with the Penguins of Antarctica

Lying between latitudes 60 and 70 South, the South Shetland Islands and the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula are a ""banana belt"" for three species of penguin--chinstrap, Adelie and gentoo. Naveen (Wild Ice) is the project director of the Antarctica Site Inventory, which studies environmental protection. He spends austral summers counting these penguins and observing their behavior. Their lives, he reports in this captivating book, revolve around food, sex, weather and turf. To travel between field sites and research stations, teams rely on expedition ships (with tourists) and the British Navy icebreaker Endurance, which supplies helicopters. Naveen deftly weaves his experience as field scientist and expedition leader with tales of earlier explorers, such as the two young poseur-adventurers, Thomas Bagshawe, 19, and Charles Lester, 23, who in the 1920s spent a year on the icy continent and produced the first life history of chinstraps and gentoos. But the real stars here are the penguins themselves. Naveen is transparently enamored of them, and his descriptions of their habits, their play, their love of little stones form the liveliest parts of his charming, if occasionally meandering, chronicle. 16 pages of color photos not seen by PW. (Feb.)