Wall St. Journal: First we had guano from space. Now we can count the poopin’ penguins, one by one (almost).
We haven’t seen much lately in the Wall St. Journal from Robert Lee Hotz, who was engaged in some special back-scene projects for the paper. But Lee’s back in byline form today and filing from McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Presumably he’s there right now, maybe not. I’ll find out and amend this accordingly.
(NO sooner filed the email newsletter than THIS JUST IN: Lee is just back, getting the pieces in after his fourth time there since 1987. )
The yarn is a good one and is free of the grandiosity that is so tempting when one is filing from the ends of the Earth. It’s a one-topic news story on Emperor Penguins as examplars for a new step in satellite-empowered natural history. Last year a spate of news stories reported that penguin specialists were excited to discover that satellite pictures clearly show – once one knows what to look for – dark and somewhat pinkish stained regions of ice that betray their rookeries. If satellites had noses maybe they could even smell them from up there (a joke, folks, a joke). Just counting rookeries was a big step forward in keeping population and distribution charts up to date. The news now is that, with the help of intelligence agencies, far sharper images reaching wildlife biologists show individual penguins (or bigger dots indicating huddled clusters of them).
He explains nicely the ambiguity, even at this new higher res, in telling whether a black pixel is one penguin or a dozen or more crammed together for warmth. One would think calibration of sat images with hand counts of a few selected colonies would narrow the error bar considerably. The Antarctic census is on.
Hotz is primarily a print guy. His multi-media skills are coming along too, as shown by the video that accompanies this story on line. What neither give us is an example of one of the satellite pictures that not only show the stained ice of rookeries but the individual birds. The story has due context. It presents the penguin census as but one example of the new mapping imagery from the great white south.
- Charlie Petit
