A Name for the Voice
Emma and Percy are a mating pair of Emperor penguins at a colony on the Antarctic sea ice. They are fictional. What they describe is not — every post matches what real Emperors are doing on the date it's published. Please don't ask how they got Wi-Fi.
Percy: It's started, Emma. Not with us — not yet — but it's started. Two down the line from me, there's a chick out. I heard the change in the neighbours before I understood it: a thinner, higher noise threading through the huddle that wasn't wind and wasn't grumbling. It was a voice, out in the open air for the first time.
Emma: And ours?
Percy: Still in. Still tapping away under my feet like it's knocking to be let out of a room. The reading birds tell me we're among the later ones — laid a touch after the first rush, so we hatch a touch after it too. Any day. Not yet. But any day.
Emma: I'm nearly to you. Close enough now that "nearly" is a real word and not a kindness. I've timed it the way we're built to — to arrive when the knocking becomes a chick, with a stomach full enough to matter.
Percy: Good. Because I've been doing a lot of standing and listening these last weeks, and standing and listening does something to you. You start to feel like you already know the small stubborn thing under your feet. And this morning, with the neighbour's chick calling and ours still knocking, I decided it needed a name.
Emma: You named the egg.
Percy: I named the voice. There's a difference, and don't you start.
Emma: Go on then. What is it.
Percy: Charlie.
Emma: …Charlie.
Percy: Charlie. I can't tell you exactly why, except that it feels like the name of something a bit different — a bit not-what-you'd-expect — and something that comes through the rough patches anyway. Ours has sat under a whole winter's worth of dark and wind and cold that would end most things, and it's still in there knocking. That earns a name with some backbone in it. Charlie's got backbone.
Emma: Charlie it is, then. I like it. It doesn't sound like a bird trying to be like every other bird.
Percy: No. It sounds like a bird that's going to be exactly itself, in a place that doesn't make that easy. Which, given the two parents on offer, is more or less guaranteed.
Emma: Hold on a little longer, both of you. I'm coming in with dinner and I'd like to be there when the knocking stops and the voice starts.
Percy: We'll wait. Charlie and I are good at waiting now. It's about the only thing we've had to practise.
Field Notes — the real biology
- Emperor chicks hatch in mid-July to early August. Eggs laid earlier in the May–June window hatch first, so at any moment a colony holds both newly hatched chicks and eggs still being incubated — Percy being among the later ones is entirely normal.
- By the time a chick hatches, the incubating male has fasted for around four months and lost close to half his body mass — the female's timed return with a full stomach is what feeds the chick in its first hours.
- A chick vocalises from inside the egg in the days before hatching, and parent and chick learn each other's individual calls — which is how, later, one parent finds one chick among thousands purely by voice.
- Newly hatched Emperor chicks weigh only about 315 grams and cannot yet regulate their own temperature; they ride in the parent's brood pouch, staying off the ice.
- The whole schedule is built so chicks fledge in summer, when the sea ice is breaking up and food is at its most reachable — nature's own deadline management.
Author's note: "Charlie" is borrowed, with affection, from a chicken the author's family once kept — an ornamental bird, a bit different from the rest of the flock, who survived a couple of predator attacks and carried on regardless. It seemed exactly the right name for a chick that spends a polar winter refusing to give up. This book is, after all, about the ones who don't fit the standard mould and thrive anyway.