They are flightless but fearless.
Scores of baby penguins bravely dove off a massive 50-foot cliff for their first-ever swim in the icy Antarctic waters below, incredible new footage shows.
Award-winning National Geographic cinematographer Bertie Gregory spent a frigid two months tracking the 10,000-strong flock of Emperor penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula when he captured the chicks’ never-before-seen behavior on camera, he told “Good Morning America.“
“It’s called fledging, when they take their first swim,” he said. “Normally they jump off of sea ice, which is 1 or 2 feet high. We were noticing that these trains of chicks were going past to a different place.
“So I launched the drone, flew it over there to see what was going on, and realized they were stacking up on the edge of a huge 50-foot ice cliff,” he continued.
“One by one they started to jump off this 50-foot ice cliff to take their first swim in the Southern Ocean.”
Video posted by Nat Geo shows a long line of hundreds of baby penguins waddling toward the edge of the daunting precipice.
They hesitantly inch to the edge when one brave chick suddenly leaps and, after flapping its helpless wings on the way down, lands in the water with a splash. The clip shows the penguin seconds later safely swimming.
Emboldened, another few chicks make the jump. Then a few more before dozens of the birds were paddling in the sea for the first time.
“They were falling and there were big chunks of ice floating in the water beneath them, so it’s like falling onto a chunk of concrete,” Gregory said. “But, to my amazement, they were not just surviving, but popping up and going, ‘I can swim!’ This is their first swim ever, the first swim of their lives.”
Gregory’s remarkable footage, which is the first time to ever show penguin chicks cliff jumping, will be featured in Nat Geo’s 2025 installment of its Emmy award-winning “Secrets of” franchise, “Secrets of the Penguins,” which premieres Earth Day 2025.
