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Emperor penguins have the most extraordinary lifecycle. They march up to 100 miles over solid ice to reach their breeding grounds. They choose to breed in the depths of the worst winter on the planet; and in an unusual role reversal, the males incubate the eggs, fasting for over 100 days to ensure they introduce their chicks safely into their new frozen world.
My Penguin Year recounts author Lindsay McCrae's adventure to the end of the Earth, spending a year living alongside the most resilient creatures in nature. He experienced every aspect of a breeding emperor's life, facing the inevitable sacrifices that came with living his childhood dream, and facing down the personal obstacles that, being over 15,000 km away from the comforts of home, almost proved too much.
Lindsay McCrae's passion for wildlife began at an early age. At school he spent any spare time building wildlife ponds and gardens, whilst spare evenings were spent watching a badger's sett near his home in the rural Lake District. His passion for watching wildlife soon turned in to a need to capture what he was seeing on film. He took a loan out from his from his mother and invested in his own camera at the age of 15 and never looked back. Lindsay has been filming wildlife professionally for over 10 years and has travelled all over the UK and across the world filming everything from emperor penguins in Antarctica to orangutans in the Indonesian jungle.
"A compelling tale of the man, those extraordinary birds and that lonely place at the end of the earth"
– Chris Packham
"[McCrae's] remarkable memoir is rich in the technological and logistical challenges of filming in extreme conditions. But most gripping are his fine-tuned observations of these beautiful metre-high birds, which must survive and raise their young in temperatures as low as -60?°C"
– Nature
