The story of the bird
The Adelie is the penguin a child draws when you say the word. Black head, white front, an upright little figure on the ice, the most southerly bird on earth. It nests further south than anything else with feathers, on the bare Antarctic coast, and it builds with the only material it has: stones. A male carries pebbles one at a time to the female, and a good clean stone is currency in a colony where the ground floods when the snow melts.
The field mark is the eye. There is no orange here, no yellow plume, none of the colour the larger penguins carry. Just a clean white ring around a dark eye in an otherwise solid black head, which gives the bird its faintly startled, faintly comic expression. Named after Adelie Land, itself named by a French explorer for his wife, the bird has been a fixture of the Antarctic imagination since.
On the page the appeal is restraint. The whole image is black, white and the cold blue-grey of ice, with the cream ground doing the warming. It is the most graphic bird in the collection, drawn with the same patient attention a warbler or a finch is given. A penguin holds a room. This one does it on two colours.
Paper and finish
Available in three sizes on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308gsm, an archival cotton rag with a soft matte surface. Printed by Prodigi with pigment inks rated 100+ years under display conditions. Framed prints are glazed, no mat, in black, white or natural.
