When we think of Antarctica, we don’t think of it being short of rock.

But rock is what runs short on the Antarctic Peninsula. Not water, not ice, not cold. Rock. Bare rock free of snow, sheltered enough to build a nest on. It’s a scarce resource, and everything on this coast that needs solid ground to breed is competing for the same limited real estate. Researchers, historic huts, weather stations, and thousands of penguins all want the same patches of rock.

For the penguins, rock is also the currency of the transaction. Male gentoos court with pebbles, and nests are built one stone at a time. The real estate and its price are made of the same thing. Antarctica runs on rocks.

I have only seen some stretches of the Peninsula, so what follows is observation rather than survey. But the pattern held everywhere I went. The colonies are predominantly gentoos now. In the water around them, the same. Big groups moving through the shallows, porpoising, feeding, and every so often, threaded through the gentoos, a single chinstrap. Never many. Sometimes just one.

The other thing that struck me is that the buildings and the birds occupy the same ground. Where a weather station stands, or a hut, or the ruin of an old whaling relic, gentoos are there too. Solid ground is solid ground. They take what they can get.

Inside a colony, everything is happening at once. Chicks are being fed, birds are being killed. Some birds are mating, others are dying, then there are the adults returning heavy from the water. The circle of life does not run at a comfortable distance here. You can taste it in the air.