Video shows emperor penguin chicks jumping off a cliff on camera for the first time in the Antarctic Ocean

Nat Geo explorer Bertie Gregory has spent the last decade traveling to far corners of the Earth to capture creatures in the wild. This time, he camped on the Antarctic Peninsula and captured never-before-seen behavior while tracking a flock of baby penguins.

“This neighborhood had about 10,000 residents, so there was a lot of noise, a lot of fun smells and a lot of fun characters,” he said. “We spent two months camping next to a colony of emperor penguins.”

Gregory went on to say, “What gets my blood pumping the most is the idea that if we keep going around the next corner or the next corner, we might see something that no one has seen before.”

And that’s just what happened.

“It’s called fledging, when they swim for the first time,” he said. “They normally jump out of the sea ice, which is a foot or two high. We noticed that these trains of chicks were passing by to a different location. So I launched the drone, flew it over there to see what was happening. And they noticed “I realized they were piled up on the edge of a huge 50-foot ice cliff. One by one they began to jump off this 50-foot ice cliff to take their first swim in the Southern Ocean.”

For the first time, this rare cliff jumping behavior was captured on video.

“They were falling and there were big chunks of ice floating in the water below them, so it’s like falling on a piece of concrete. But to my surprise, not only did they survive, they came up and said, ‘I can swim.'” ‘ “This is the first bath of their life, the first bath of their lives.”

But for now, for more amazing Earth Month content, check out the our house collection on Disney+. Learn more about the historic penguin leap at NatGeo.com.

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