Understanding how scientists work is often hard for those with no scientific training. Too often the media picture scientists as rather mad boffins in white coats, cloistered in their laboratories and totally out of touch with the real world. This is a book to set them right, describing how a gifted ornithologist not only works himself, but how he inspires others to join his group and become as passionate as he is in the search for a better understanding of the way our world works.

This is the story of how a scientific quest has taken over the life of Bill Fraser, of how in his determination to understand Adélie penguins he has spent almost every summer for the past 30 years working at Palmer Station on Anvers Island. Fighting for funding and always battling against the weather, Fraser has been driving his team to collect long-term data of very high accuracy in order to test new hypotheses on how and why the numbers of Adélies in that area are declining.

The book comes out of the author's third visit to Palmer in the US Writer & Artists Program, and could only have been achieved because of her close working relationship with Fraser. Meredith Hooper is not a scientist, and it is clear that she worked hard to understand the thinking behind Fraser's approach and how his ability to synthesise data allows him to come up with novel interpretations. It also allowed her to ask the simple questions that are so hard to answer.

The book is essentially a diary of the summer of 2001–2002, which she spent with Fraser's group, accompanying them on exhausting fieldwork trips, watching them sort stomach samples, sharing in their concerns over the weather and the targets unachieved. That particular summer proved to be a truly disastrous one for the Adélie penguins, with a further major decline in their populations as the weather made breeding first difficult and then survival of the chicks almost impossible.

Her descriptions of the way in which the data are collected, as well as of the social interactions in Palmer Station itself will be revelatory to those who have never spent time on an Antarctic research station. The enthusiasm and dedication of all the participants comes through very clearly, as does the universal lack of privacy and the claustrophobic elements that characterise all small communities. She describes the social distinction between the scientists and the logistics people employed by Raytheon, but it seemed to me much less of a problem in the small Palmer station than is obvious at the much larger station of McMurdo, where the two groups live almost parallel lives. Her enjoyment of simply being in the Antarctic and taking part in something she clearly feels is important and worthwhile comes through very clearly.

The bigger story here is that the decline in Adélie penguins, top predators in the Southern Ocean marine ecosystem, is inextricably linked to global change. It is the biological equivalent of the retreating glaciers and ice shelves, and yet to unravel its complexities can take a lifetime's work.

If I have a complaint, it is that the book is too long and the reader may get bored and give up before the interesting final chapters. Hooper gives repeated accounts of trips to different islands to count birds, which provide little extra to the scene she has already set. We really don't need 32 chapters to understand the scientific work, nor do we need them to provide the interesting social background. A more rigorous editing would have provided a more immediate message without losing any of the key elements. In addition to the text, the book has some useful maps, some colour photos, a brief bibliography, and a useful index.

Whilst there have been other books describing different fields of science in the Antarctic by the scientists themselves, I have not seen a book quite like this before. Hooper's familiarity with the research station and the Antarctic environment combined with her probing questions in areas many scientists simply take for granted means this is an interesting and different contribution to why and how we do science in Antarctica.