penguins live in the thousands. But these penguins are more than just cute. The health of the Antarctic  

ecosystem relies on their well being. So the  scientists in this next documentary, count them  

yeah by hand in the freezing cold and walking  on steep cliffs. It's been years since this last  

happened, but the data collected will now inform  them of how one of the most remote places on earth  

is faring. If you want to know what  it took to film in such a hostile and  

rather crowded location, stick around after  the credits for a Q&A with the filmmakers.  

And now from, Greenpeace International, This is "Disappearing Penguins."

[NARRATOR] On the far side of the planet, lies one of  the most remote and inhospitable places on Earth.

Elephant Island –situated just off  the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula,  

is a rugged landscape of cliffs  and glaciers shaped by brutal  

winds. It's also home to vast colonies of  one of Antarctica's most iconic animals.  

Supported by environmental organization,  Greenpeace, a team of scientists lands on  

Elephant Island. For the first time in 50 years,  they will investigate how its penguins are faring.  

The health of the Antarctic ecosystem is  linked to the state of penguin populations.  

And the best way to measure  those is by counting the birds.

[FORREST] So we're counting penguins. And why do we count  penguins? Well, penguins are great bio-indicators.  

And they'll tell us what the health of the ocean  around Antarctica is because they krill krill eat  

phytoplankton. So we can tell indirectly, what  the productivity of the oceans around here,  

how it's responding to environmental change.  And so we can't really adequately count the  

phytoplankton, it's really difficult to count  krill. But we can count penguins because they  

come ashore every year to the same places  to breed. And we're getting some idea about  

how the ocean is performing by how  penguin populations change over time.  

And we go nest by nest. We're  counting this because we want  

to know what the breeding population is. We're  not interested in all these penguins that are  

roaming around that you see kind of  wandering about here. A lot of those  

are non-breeders. They just come here because  there's a lot of penguins, a lot of activity.  

We want to know what the size of the breeding  population is, because that's what's going to make  

new penguins for the future. And those are  the most sensitive parts of this population.

[NARRATOR] There are multiple penguins  species on Elephant Island,  

such as the Gentoo with their distinctive  orange beak, the flamboyant Macaroni Penguin,  

and even these towering King penguins,  carefully shuffling across the island.

[AMBIENT NOISE] Michael, Michael,

[NARRATOR]The researchers record all penguins.  But I'm mainly interested in chinstraps  

so called for the narrow black band on the  underside of their heads. The chin straps are the  

noisiest and most numerous penguin on the island.  And since weather conditions here are not always  

suitable for field work. The race is on to find  out exactly how numerous the chinstraps still are.

[STRYKER] There's four of us penguin counters. One person  says, "Okay, I'll take the high point up to the  

right" one person says, "I'll go up to the left"  one person, that's me today, starts down low  

and we'll work our way up and then we all  meet in the middle. And it's important to  

divide it up like that so that we can be sure  not to be counting the same penguins twice.

[NARRATOR] It's January, which means the  height of Antarctic summer  

with one or two chicks to each nest. The colonies  are dense packs of shrieking and pecking birds,  

which makes moving around a delicate affair.

[STRYKER] Normally, we don't try to walk through the colony  because it's so dense, but here there's just no  

free space in between the thing right and so  very carefully. You try to step on the highest  

stones between the birds and obviously not  getting too close to their nests, if you can.

[STRYKER] Counting penguins at its core is pretty basic. It really is "1, 2, 3" we actually count them all three  

times to try to get a count that's within 5% error.  It kind of looks crazy. Sometimes we're standing  

on a rock gazing over a penguin colony. Very  still with our arms out And it looks like we're  

conducting a symphony of penguins or something  like that, because we're out there, really looking  

at every single individual penguin, and literally  counting heads. And if there's only 10 penguins in  

a colony, it's pretty easy. If there's 100, you  can get through them. If you're surrounded by  

1000 penguins in one big blob. That's what  I would call "Advanced Penguin Counting"

[NARRATOR] But some colonies are over 10,000 individuals,  

and Chinstraps love to nest on steep and  exposed cliffs that are hard to reach on foot.  

So to count all of these flightless birds,  your best bet is to take to the air.

[SHAH] So when we get to colonies that are so big  that it's almost infeasible to count by hand,  

we use aerial surveys, the idea is to capture  all colonies with aerial images, so that we  

can either use a manual count or machine  learning algorithm to do the counts for us.  

When we arrive at a site, we do a quick lay  of the land where the different colonies are.  

And then we pick out a system where we can make  sure that we we don't miss any of the colonies.  

So we started a logical point, and set up a grid  survey with GPS locations of the boundaries of the  

colonies. And then we launched the drone, and have  it run the grid patterns. And then at that point,  

it's pretty hands off, it flies to the first  point and heads to the series of waypoints.  

And the drone is able to take photos every two  seconds. And that's how we can get a set of  

images with a decent amount of overlap that can  be used in the next step, which is photo mosaic.  

Once it finishes the whole  whole survey, we retrieve it.  

And that's how we can finish a site and  then walk over to the next area. And so on.

[STRYKER] For a bird nerd like me being in the  middle of a penguin colony here and  

practically unexplored Island in Antarctica  is like the ultimate experience. I can't  

even describe it makes my skin tingle around the  Zodiac. And we're coming into the beat is seeing  

all these birds waiting for us to arrive.

[STRYKER] I love penguins, they're just, they're  so easy to empathize with, because  

they act like people in so many ways. They have  all these curious behaviors they run around,  

they're always on a mission up to something  they're very energetic, they're charismatic.

penguins are really amazing creatures, they  are hardcore. And they have some pretty amazing  

adaptations to survive. Here. They have the  densest packed feathers of any bird in the world,  

it's something like 90 feathers per square inch  that gives them their waterproof parka and down  

jacket all in one. They spend a lot of their time  swimming, they can swim for months at a stretch  

without stopping, they sleep on the ocean, the  only reason they ever come to land at all is to  

build a nest. And then they go and spend the rest  of their lives actually in the ocean offshore. And  

to be an animal that only exists in the Southern  Ocean for months at a time just swimming around  

finding the fish and krill that they need to eat.  That is hard for us to imagine and comprehend. And  

that I think is partly why it's so  fascinating for us to see penguins down here.

[STRYKER] I think that we can learn a lot by watching  birds, because birds at their core need  

most of the same things that we do they  need a place to live, they need food,  

they need to find a mate and leave a legacy. I  think that also birds experience all kinds of  

similar emotions and thoughts and feelings. So I  think by coming out here and doing these studies,  

it's almost like we're looking at our own behavior  through the prism of another species. And that  

gives us a license to take a step back and say,  Oh, yeah, okay, that's what's really happening.

[NARRATOR] Penguin colonies may remain in place for  centuries and Chinstraps, even though they  

venture out to sea for hundreds of miles,  always return to the same colony to breed.  

The last and only time elephant islands penguin  population was properly surveyed, was in 1971.  

The maps and data from that  British joint services expedition  

are now being used by the present day researchers.

[FORREST] So we've got some great data from 50 years ago  about what the p-penguin populations looked  

like. So we'll compare our counts to that,  that historic data and we'll get some idea about  

whether things are changing or not.

penguins are extremely well adapted to live in  Antarctica in these conditions. But when those  

conditions then start to change, that's when  we start getting worried about them because  

they've evolved over so many eons to live in this  place as it is, and then as it starts to change,  

then we'll see how adaptable the penguins can be.

[NARRATOR] The Antarctic is witnessing vast changes. Over the  past 50 years, temperatures have risen by around  

three degrees centigrade, one of  the fastest increases in the world.  

Among other things, the  warming affects ice formation.  

And the underside of sea ice is a critical  habitat for krill, the shrimp like creatures  

which are food for many of Antarctica's  animals, including Chinstrap penguins.

[FORREST] The climate change losers here are chinstrap  penguins. Every year where else we go on the  

peninsula. We're seeing chinstrap declines over  the last 50 years, and it's been dramatic. Some  

of those populations have declined as much as 50%  we've seen chinstrap colonies completely vanish.

[NARRATOR] A changing climate is not the  only threat to Chinstraps.  

In recent years, krill fishing has  caused competition for their food,  

creating additional pressure on the penguins  in ways we are yet to fully understand.  

After 10 days of counting and covering  98% of the colonies surveyed in 1971,  

it's time for the researchers  to add up the results

[AMBIENT FORREST] 44...45....45....16, three times.

[NARRATOR] All of Elephant Island's 32  colonies show declines. And overall,  

the chinstrap population has  fallen by almost 60% in 50 years,

[AMBIENT FORREST] 11, three times

[FORREST] we try to keep an impartial look at this in terms of our emotional response to the data.

It's It's disturbing from the standpoint of the amount of change is happening so rapidly.

We just don't see this kind of stuff.  And other ecosystems generally. Have  

you seen this with say any terrestrial mammal  species over a 50 year period people would be  

certainly concerned. It suggests the amount of  change that's happening here – how rapid it's it is.  

It remains to be seen what the  what the ultimate consequences are.  

Not just for Chinstrap penguins,  but for the ecosystem as a whole.

[STRYKER] If you removed all the penguins  from Antarctica, what would happen?  

I don't want to do that experiment. As  a scientist or as a person who loves  

birds. The penguins are a keystone in  Antarctica, there's something like 90% of  

the avian biomass in this region is penguins.  And there are millions and millions of them.  

We are seeing some worrying  declines in their populations.  

So right now I'm not so much worried that  the chinstrap penguin is gonna go extinct  

as that they're telling us that  something in their larger ecosystem  

is broken in some way and that the changes  in their populations are reflecting that.

[FORREST] I've been coming down here for 25 years, and I've  seen some pretty remarkable changes been seeing  

penguin populations crash, literally, climates  changing more rapidly in the Antarctic Peninsula,  

probably any place on the planet. It's very  likely that when we experience these things in our  

temperate climates, where we all live, we're  also going to have to adapt just as the  

chinstrap penguins are doing right now. So it's  a lesson for us because we've, we're either going to  

heed this example that we're seeing down here  in the Antarctic, or we won't, and we'll suffer  

the consequences just as Unfortunately, the  chinstrap penguins seem to be doing down here.  

They don't have a chance to control their  environment. They're stuck with whatever we  

hand them, but we have the ability to change  and we should take serious measures to do so.

[NARRATOR] Antarctica has always been a continent that  has challenged us. Now its challenge is for  

us to leave it unharmed, and established large  scale protection for those living on the edge.

Now, let's hear from the ground team  on their experience of elephant Island  

and its special occupants.

[BENSON] So I'm Frida Benson, and I was expedition leader  for the expedition where this film was made.

[VAN ROUVEROY] And my name is Maartin Van Rouveroy. And  I was the onboard camera man, filmmaker,  

for this project that the film resulted from.

[BENSON] Greenpeace is one of the oldest environmental  organization and is truly global. So it was  

started 50 years ago, turning 50  years, actually, today with a sort of  

aim of a greener, peaceful world.

[VAN ROUVEROY] Yes, Elephant Island where we did most of the filming. It's very inhospitable, and it's been  

visited by very few people. But famously, this  is where Ernest Shackleton the British explorer,  

stranded with his men, and they had to  survive in the Antarctic winter. For us,