Every explorer starts somewhere.
Before the ocean. Before the ice. Before the thousand miles of open water that will one day mean nothing to you, there is a single moment of not yet. Of soft edges and borrowed warmth and a world that is enormous in every direction and entirely unclear.
Adélie chicks are simply here, in the cold, doing the first hard thing on a very long list of hard things, with nothing but the vague biological certainty that this is what they should be doing.
Baby Adelie penguin photographed on South Georgia Island, 2020
