Narrators

2012/11/15 Carton Virto, Eider - Elhuyar Zientzia

• Giza zientziak

"Sexual habits. We will remove this part and print only a few copies. How many would we like? wrote the head of zoology at the Natural History Museum to the head of birds. (...) The sexual habits of the Adélie penguin, the sexual customs of the Adélie penguins. Originally part of the book Natural History of the Adélie penguin, written by George Murray Levick. But the book was published without that part in 1915; what Levick counted there was too crude to publish it.

Thus begins the story published in the last magazine Elhuyar, “The Perverted and Cruel Penguins of George Murray Levick”. Levick was one of the members of Scott's prestigious trip to the South Pole of 1910, a marine surgeon who devoted himself to scientific exploration of the environment. Some of the behaviors observed during the study of penguin colonies, Adélie, were totally altered, enough to get rid of the book he wrote about them. Moreover, he noted in his notebook notes on the cruelest “crimes” and the most perverse sexual behaviors, in Greek alphabet, to prevent anyone from reading it.

Among these perversions were necrophilia, masturbation, homosexual actions, collective rape and murder. The hooligans were the perpetrators of the worst crimes. This is how Levick named the remaining unmarried males and wrote fondly about them, for example: "Once one of the two chites who were in the nest with his mother walked away a little, he was suddenly caught by a hooliga and raped in the eyes of his mother. His mother, as it happened, continued in the nest with the other, and when the attacked chick managed to escape and returned to his mother, he did not want to know anything with the child, who asked him every time he tried to return to the nest. Desperate, she tried if another parent had adopted him, but no one had, and she received so much pecking that by the end she had to kill him to get rid of the pain."

The passages censored in 1915 have seen the light this year. They have remained in the archive of the Natural History Museum in London for nearly a hundred years, until a conservator locates it and decides to publish it. They have been published in the journal Polar Record, along with the interpretation made by two researchers experts in penguins, that dead penguins have the same posture as the female willing to copulate, which are not necrophiles.

A few days ago I told the story and they sent me via twitter the news of the following news: “Gay Penguins Become Dads!” was a note on the website of the Good Men project, referring to the news “World first as gay King penguins become fathers” published in the Toronto Star newspaper. The news told how in a zoo in Denmark, a pair of emperor penguins formed by two males have incubated an abandoned egg and become parents. Support for the news was evident in both areas.

“XXI. The Good Men is presented as a project that takes a look at what can be the masculinity of the twentieth century. The description is perfectly related to the anecdote of penguins and the summary of all these stories. That is, with a difference of one hundred years and very different perspectives, that the penguin, especially the narrator, reflects

us.