By Susan Milius
Holding an unhappy penguin can drive even a careful person to take risks. In her first field season in the Antarctic, Barbara Wienecke was struggling to fasten a small radio transmitter to a penguin that was struggling to get away. To finish the job quickly, Wienecke took off her gloves for a few minutes.
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As she worked frantically, her fingers paled and then “went from something white colored, which still looked a bit like skin, to something rather waxy that looked nothing like skin,” she says. The fingers then started to swell, a sign that ice crystals were forming, and soon went numb. “Then, thank God, the bird was ready to go,” she says. She’d exposed her hands for only 7 minutes or so, but the temperature hung near –25°C and the wind was up.