Drone footage of fledging penguins jumping off cliff | Hacker News Reader

Drone footage of fledging penguins jumping off cliff

petapixel.com

223 pointstomcam90 comments

These juveniles are lucky to not be in a place where the ice melts before they have their water-resistant feathers. This possibility is becoming an existential threat to some penguin colonies.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-08-24/record-...

This should probably just link directly to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PwDFddpo4c (if you're impatient, skip to 1:50).

There's times and place when I don't have time, patience or can't due to circumstance watch a video so just seeing a couple of pictures is enough.

Here's a timestamped link if you are too impatient to skip it yourself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PwDFddpo4c&t=110

i think you can skip to even deeper https://youtu.be/4PwDFddpo4c?t=137

It's borderline I suppose, but the article text does contain enough background information to maybe keep it

Given this video is taken by a drone, and drones are very noisy, are the splashing sounds and sounds of penguins chirping added later?

Yes

Sounds in almost all nature documentary videos are added later from separate sources.

That makes sense. I'd never thought about it. You've saved me the disappointment of visiting Antarctica to realize that David Attenborough's voice doesn't just chime in whenever you look at something.

Surprisingly, the voice is the only part of the audio that's real.

Been to Antarctica twice. Attenborough's voice definitely chimes in.

Two dimensions to this question: first, drone noise; second, audio track.

On the noise:

> "Given this video is taken by a drone, and drones are very noisy..."

Here's from National Geographic's press release on this video:

“Through the harnessing of new technology and pushing the boundaries of polar filming, Bertie utilized a newly released camera drone equipped with a telephoto lens allowing him to capture animal behavior from the air like never before without disrupting or impacting the penguins.”

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240411040454/en/Nat...

So they were aware of the noise and other disturbance to the penguins, and were far enough away its unlikely these sounds are recorded from the drone itself.

On the audio track:

Mics and recorders could have been placed in advance. Given the level of preparation described, this is a possibility.

Audio of a given action or situation could have been captured separately elsewhere and dubbed. This seems most likely, and if natural sounds were captured on location from the same flocks, wouldn't generally carry a disclaimer.

In either of these cases, the drone doesn't need a mic, or can carry one just for sound sync purposes, but the sound is done in foley with or without a field recording.

To use drone audio without it audible to the viewer, shotgun mics with a sound pattern that picks up far point noise (imagine a teleaudio mic to go with the telephoto lens) could be used.

Drone noise is distinct, and can be removed, firms and software specialize in this: https://www.sound2design.com/online-sound-restoration-and-dr...

One way is to point the shotguns at silence, record drone noise alone, then invert it, something like "speech transparency" mode in noise cancelling headphones.

Today's audio processing is relatively magical when it doesn't have to fit in an earbud.

I haven't researched this case, but it sounded like foley.

Thats a lot of word to say you dont know beyond the sentence you quote

Its likely fake like most NatGeo vids (not that it takes away any of the visual awesomeness)

> Thats a lot of word to say you dont know beyond the sentence you quote. Its likely fake...

And a lot of words to agree that “it's unlikely these sounds are recorded from the drone”?

The additional words are to share the most common industry ways it can be done if it's not foley.

OTOH, if you're "the" david guetta, my words certainly wasted your time. :-)

The audio track in nature documentaries is unfortunately almost entirely foley.

Its interesting how unskilled nature can be and still get away with it (here I guess to the thick fur/skin/fat below).

If humans would jump from such height so badly, many injuries and possibly few deaths would be happening. I've done my fair of jumps in Swiss swimming pools / beaches where 10m jumping board is standard equipment, and even slightly incorrect landing can be quite brutal on the body. Falling ie on the back badly orientated could easily move vertebrae with corresponding consequences.

Indeed. Not to mention, aside from a few "jumps", most of the falls in the video seem unwanted/slips due to pushing. Uncoordinated, and hitting the water pretty much randomly.

It's mainly due to the square/cube law. Small things, including animals, can fall from great heights with little damage.

Add feathers to that, and those heights become really great.

Or, as Haldane wrote in “On being the right size” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Being_the_Right_Size:

“You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force”

That’s half the equation and explains why speeds are lower.

There’s another square cube relationship around the volume of an object vs the impact area.

And tensile strength of muscles and bones, which is proportional to cross-section area, hence also is tenfold stronger relative to mass.

I'd imagine that jumping so far into such cold water, even if your form is perfect, would also be quite shocking to your system and probably dangerous in and of itself. I say this as someone who went swimming with penguins in Antarctica this January. No way I would enter that cold water so deeply and quickly.

Evolution is big on expending the minimum amount of resources to achieve the can-get-away-with-it level.

For those who might be worried to click: the penguin chicks are fledging and going off to swim for the first time; they are not jumping to their doom.

Thanks, that exactly was why I didn't want to click.

Wow. Phrasing!

Thanks, we've put that word in the title above, in place of the 'baby' bit which is baity anyhow.

Could be a parody video clip for "I believe I can fly"

♬ I believe I can fly. ♬ Oh, shit! No I can't.

Jumping in is the easy part. How do they get back up on land?

They are capable of fast swimming, enough to gain momentum so they can pop back up onto land or an ice floe.

https://youtu.be/_OHDYS8qTzQ?t=935s

Yeah, but that cliff was around 40ft, according to the narrator. They aren’t swimming fast enough to hop back up that.

Clearly, they beach elsewhere.

Penguins migrate 100s to 1,000s of km, and can swim great distances. They need not beach near their entry point, and are in the water to feed.

That said, where these penguin fledglings beach would be interesting to see.

<https://animalatlantes.com/how-do-penguins-migrate/>

Clearly I've spent too much time on Reddit, I just assumed they were joking and had reversed the video...

It is interesting to ask how such events are organized. It did not look like they are led by an adult. What triggered such gatherings?

Very odd footage imo.

* most of the birds are falling in because they’re pushed, not because they’re jumping

* most of the birds are belly flopping hard rather than diving in with any sort of graceful entry

* most birds don’t appear to ever jump. I refuse to believe the camera wouldn’t have shown the whole population in the water if they had

Maybe it's some sort of weird social test like baby cowbirds.

> most of the birds are falling in because they’re pushed, not because they’re jumping

It's the same as every other bird? It surprised me that it isn't their parents pushing them.

Like out of the nest? That doesn’t really track with the mass movement towards the cliff edge as a precursor.

The pushing starts when the ones a few rows back want a closer look... might not be deliberate or premeditated.

Years ago I heard a possibly apocryphal story -- that's at least halfway consistent with what's seen in this video -- about how a mass of penguins decide if they're in a safe place to go for a swim:

They gather near the edge of the ice and jostle each other until one bird falls in. Then they watch to see if it gets eaten by a predator. If not, the rest of them dive in and go for a swim...

I don't think there is any reason to think a belly flop would have the same effect on a penguin as it would on a human.

Surely there is one: gravity and water tension work the same for both.

For something so interesting, the title is extremely inappropriate clickbait.

Interesting how they know not to jump off onto an ice sheet below.

If you consider how adept they are at fishing for example, it doesn't seem like a leap that they've have the spatial awareness and wherewithal to recognize that falling onto something far below is scary.

I suspect the human understanding of these types of dangers becomes cerebral, but it originate in much more instinctual parts of us which we share with countless other animals. The part where it becomes cerebral might trick us into thinking it's entirely based upon knowledge, intricate abstractions of the world around us, and the intelligence required to use those properly. I'm not sure of course, it's all conjecture. It doesn't surprise me that penguins know not to fall far onto hard things though.

Something tells me it's just bird genes trying to fly from high. Swimming is a different type of traversal so might even kind of work as a reward mechanic

Ha! I like that take. And they do “fly”, just under water.

I wonder if this is how birds learned to fly.

This is a (now 'deprecated') evolutionary artifact from that process, yes.

And that penguin's name ... Johnathan Livingston Seagull.

Sounds like they dropped rocks into a swimming pool for their sound effects.

Overheard in the flock:

"nee nah, I bet you dare not to jump!"

skip to 3:00 if you just want to see them jump...

'We can do this, we're birds, just flap...'

It kind of bothers me that animals probably do this stuff because they are so freakin hungry. Nature is beautiful but harsh.

Fear not, no penguins were harmed in the making of this film.

Seems very difficult to explain this as food motivated

There's edible fish in the water. What other food is there on the ice?

Penguins enter the water all the time to hunt fish.

Not off cliffs.

>Every January, when the chicks are around five months old, they undergo a process known as fledging. During this process, the chicks lose their baby feathers and leave their colony for the first time — jumping from an enormous cliff into the ocean to take their first swim.

It was their first swim. Maybe the cliff was the closest shore

Pretty cool, but what is "the secret".

First, the heading wording feels like intentional clickbait to make at least a portion of people think they might be jumping to their death, they don't!

They build something up like there is something coming, some actual reason WHY they do it from that high. But they totally failed on delivering any reveal, at least in the video, did not read the entire article.

They made up to be some giant mystery, and I was expecting there is some kind of great reveal thing that has some kind of benefit, something evolutionary or whatever something, - nothing - absolutely nothing. Basically because they did not want to walk down a long way I guess, if there even was a way to an easier jump.

Seems common for documentaries about nature. A few seconds of good footage surrounded by minutes of filler and clickbait.

First drone footage of x is becoming a little rarefied, not to say boring and predictable for some values of x.

So I expect this to be the peak of consumers buying little mavics to film their trips to Mont Blanc or the Amalfi Coast. Honestly, their friends are not interested. It was sad and ridiculous while it lasted, and now I hope it's over.

Seems like a stupid take to me. The fact that it is drone footage is not why it’s interesting. It’s merely indicating that it’s drone footage because that implies a novel ability to film something interesting from a good angle.

Why should they care what their friends think? Can we not take pictures and videos of things for our own enjoyment of that act?

FWIW I don't own a drone nor have I ever considered buying one. I do have a horde of 35mm film cameras though.

If it was really enjoyable, you will remember it. The human memory is designed to fix emotional experiences. No need for celluloid or pixels. If you were with a loved one, your future conversations about that time will keep the memory alive.

There is a certain value and excitement in showing personal photos or videos to grand-children. But their children will not even know your name.

The vanity and self-importance of youthful experiences will wane with age, reflection, wisdom, and a certain acceptance of our transient existence.

Yes, I left many meaningless 35mm negatives, in a long forgotten attic, of a distant house, which I used to inhabit. Nobody will miss them. Not even me. If they are, perchance, discovered by a future owner of the house, they will be excited, for about 10 minutes, then throw them away.

> If it was really enjoyable, you will remember it. The human memory is designed to fix emotional experiences. No need for celluloid or pixels. If you were with a loved one, your future conversations about that time will keep the memory alive.

Words to live by.

My point is this: the act of capturing photo and/or video is itself the draw for some people. It's an art form - beauty isn't just captured in a photograph, it's created through composition. A great photo is never just a photo of a great thing.

Why should the transience of my art deter me, if I myself am also transient?

I think the value of photography is in teaching how to really see and appreciate the world, not in any artifact you may have created (at least not very often, unless you are a genius).

It is similar to the way learning a musical skill (instrument, composition, production) teaches you to really hear music, which is probably more valuable than any particular sounds you created (again, geniuses excepted).

There is a similar formula for other artistic and professional practices. No graphic designer just reads a web page. No cabinetmaker walks into a room and sees it the way you do. No architect or town planner ever just walks down an anonymous street in a strange city...

I think you may be speaking from an affluent bubble. None of my friends ever approached me with their drone footage. And my grandma would absolutely be stoked if I did show her something like this from myself. Yes, drone video have become a bit too much of a thing in any kind of documentary (and it can be a tad boring for at least 5-10 years now). But that is just how it is, colored video (or HD etc) is also not novel anymore, yet we keep doing it.

First written account of x is becoming a little rarefied, not to say boring and predictable for some values of x. So I expect this to be the peak of consumers buying little bics to write about their trips to Mont Blanc or the Amalfi Coast. Honestly, their friends are not interested. It was sad and ridiculous while it lasted, and now I hope it's over.

Assumed to be obvious before it was observed (how else?).

Seen and filmed many many times for adults leaping into the water.

Already documented: 'witnessed by scientists'.

Published by a site called petapixel with breathless words like 'astonishing', 'unprecedented', 'enormous cliff', 'huge jumps', 'rare and heart-stopping', 'extraordinary footage', 'huge ice cliff', 'brave chick' ... in an effort to create buzz for their sponsor National Geographic.

The only mildly interesting phrase is: 'Scientists who monitor penguins from satellites'. Sounds like a fun job and I'm sure AI can help. I didn't know that (although I once helped the BAS effort to monitor elephant seals diving deep in the S.Atlantic, using radio transponders glued to their backs, with burst-transmit-on-surfacing via satellite, so I should not have been surprised, had I thought for a second). But then they spoil it by adding 'satellites...in space'.

If the chicks were drawing lots to see who had to jump first, then I might be interested.

How is this related to tech and hacking or anything with innovation?

It's a great inspiration for linux wallpapers and memes. ; )

From the guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's a metaphor.

The innovative use of drones to capture a never-before-seen moment in nature?

Nature/science meets technology/science.

I found this fascinating.

I'd add to the other responses that this footage was the result of technical progress and wouldn't have been possible to achieve otherwise.

Because eventually it becomes your turn to jump first.

You never had to YOLO code into production? Pretty much the same thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com