When you think of mysterious creatures, penguins probably don’t come to mind. The cute, playful animals are the focus of countless films and TV shows, fictional and real-world, and a staple in zoos and aquariums. But it turns out we still have a lot to learn about them, as revealed in National Geographic’s new docuseries Secrets of the Penguins.
“As soon as we started filming, we started to see things that had never been filmed before,” wildlife cinematographer and National Geographic Explorer Bertie Gregory told me over Zoom. “Before this project, I thought I knew penguins. I was so wrong.”
The three-episode series offers an intimate look at the lives of various penguin species and their struggle for survival on a rapidly changing planet. We watch them brave Antarctic storms, trek across deserts and even wander the streets of Cape Town. For the first time on camera, we see hopeful parents practice the delicate art of handing off an egg to one another using a ball of ice. We also observe Galapagos penguins sneakily steal fish from pelican beaks to streamline the hunting process. More than 70 scientists and filmmakers spent two years traveling the globe to capture these rare and breathtaking moments.
“What comes rolling back from the field teams is usually astonishing and often scientifically interesting in that, ‘Oh, we never saw that before,'” says famed Titanic and Avatar director and ocean explorer James Cameron, who serves as executive producer on Secrets of the Penguins.
The docuseries, which Blake Lively narrates, premieres April 20 at 8 p.m. ET (5 p.m. PT) on National Geographic, and is available to stream on Disney Plus and Hulu starting April 21 — just ahead of Earth Day.
Emperor penguin chicks jumping off the ice shelf edge for their first swim in Atka Bay, Antarctica.
One scene in particular stands out. In first-ever footage, hundreds of emperor penguin chicks gather on an Antarctic cliff, 50 feet above the ocean. “What on earth is going on here?” Gregory wonders aloud. “I’ve only ever seen emperors jump in off the sea ice, and that’s a couple of feet, maximum. Surely, they can’t be thinking of going off there.”
But they are. Suddenly, one brave penguin leaps — and makes it unscathed. Other chicks hesitantly follow suit, jumping into the icy water far below. National Geographic shared the rare moment in a teaser video last year, which went viral.
“I mean, you couldn’t script a more crazy moment for the close of the opening episode,” Gregory, who captured the leap via drone, told me. “Brand new behavior, crazy to look at and heart-in-your-mouth stuff — a total emotional roller coaster.”
A group of African Penguins crossing a road in Simon’s Town, South Africa.
Right place, right time, right tools
The key to capturing all the rare moments in Secrets of the Penguins is time.
“Time in the field, time with the animals,” Gregory says. “That’s how you get stuff that no one has seen before and how you film it beautifully.”
Normally, he notes, wildlife shoots last about four to six weeks. But the first episode of the series alone took 274 days to shoot, he says. Altogether, the team filmed across a two-year period to capture footage for the three-episode documentary.
Drones were a key tool for filming. Technological improvements like increased flight time and more powerful zoom lenses meant the team could easily capture rare moments from a distance. They could also hover in the air longer, waiting for special moments to unfold, like the chicks jumping.
“That was only possible because of drones,” Gregory says. “I was hovering in the air for hours and hours and hours, constantly, every half hour, changing the battery to fly out again, and I needed to be in the air for that moment that they all started to jump. Without drones, I wouldn’t have been able to film that behavior.”
Bertie Gregory filming in Atka Bay, Antarctica.
Before heading out into the Antarctic cold, cameras were put in a freezer to see how they’d hold up. Cables that were easily snappable were altered to have more durable materials.
“Natural history photography actually pushes the art of photography, the tools of photography,” Cameron says. “We’re not in a comfortable studio; we’re out in some of the most hostile regions.”
But Cameron, who has also executive produced previous seasons of the National Geographic series like Secrets of the Whales and Secrets of the Elephants, as well as several deep-sea documentaries, says those nature-oriented productions are especially meaningful to him.
“The question people always ask me is, ‘Did you go to the deepest place in the ocean so that you could find some new animals so you could create an alien for Avatar?'” Cameron laughed. “It’s the other way around: I made Avatar so I’d have enough money to go do the exploration. The shoe’s on the other foot there — their dot connecting is wrong.”
An adult Gentoo penguin standing on its nest with its two young chicks.
What penguins reveal about our planet
There’s a common theme that surfaces throughout Secrets of the Penguins: climate change. We see chicks navigate breaking sea ice that threatens to pull them under before they’re ready to swim and others search for suitable homes across changing terrain.
“You can’t study penguins without bumping up against climate change,” Cameron says. “We touch on it, we’ll mention it in passing, but we’re not here to beat that over the head, because I think the goal of the series is to especially take a new generation of viewers and cause them to have a sense of love and wonder at nature.”
Because some penguins live in marginal coastal environments, he notes, and polar regions are especially impacted by climate change, that glaring reality is even more evident in this documentary than in previous seasons of the series.
Gregory emphasized the dangers of our changing environment both in the closing moments of Secrets of the Penguins, and in our interview.
“Penguins are incredibly tough, resilient, adaptable animals, but they are living right on the edge of their existence. And we, because of our actions, are pushing them over that edge,” he told me. “We should want to look after penguins not just because they’re cute and they make us feel warm and fuzzy inside, but because they are indicators of a healthy planet, and we need a healthy planet just as much as the penguins do. Our success is intricately tied to the success of penguins.”
See also: The Titanic Gets Digitally Cloned in This New National Geographic Documentary
