Penguins are insanely resilient—and these explorers are revealing their secrets

As a boy growing up in Argentina’s Buenos Aires Province, Pablo “Popi” García Borboroglu was enchanted by his grandmother’s tales of her youthful visits to the teeming penguin colonies of Argentine Patagonia. He was a 19-year-old tour guide when he first glimpsed one, and it dawned on him then how important it was to share with others his sense of awe, inspiring them to protect penguins and their habitats. 

A hemisphere away, Bertie Gregory came to a similar realization as a teenage wildlife photographer roaming the English countryside. Today, at 31, he’s an accomplished wildlife filmmaker and lead storyteller behind the upcoming National Geographic series Secrets of the Penguins—on which he worked with Borboroglu, now a marine biologist and founder and president of the Global Penguin Society. For their efforts, Borboroglu and Gregory have been named the 2025 Rolex National Geographic Explorers of the Year.

“Popi García Borboroglu and Bertie Gregory exemplify the power of collaboration in exploration,” says National Geographic Society CEO Jill Tiefenthaler. “By uniting groundbreaking conservation science with masterful storytelling, they not only deepen our understanding of penguins but galvanize global action to protect them.” 

Borboroglu’s initiatives to create protected areas for penguins have helped conserve some 32 million acres of habitat, on land and at sea. Now 55, he takes inspiration from the birds’ resilience—the way they swim hundreds or thousands of miles for food, avoid predators and pollution, and survive in environments increasingly impacted by climate change. “When you see penguins making that big effort,” he reflects, “you say, How can I give up?”

Being recognized as an Explorer of the Year alongside his filmmaker friend, Borboroglu says, is “fantastic … a great combination of different kinds of explorers and expertise.”

At first, Gregory says, he was hesitant to make a documentary about penguins. The Emmy-winning host of the Disney+ series Animals Up Close, who has shot for iconic series like Planet Earth and Frozen Planet, knew that filming in penguins’ harsh habitats would be tough—and worried the species was already plenty documented. “If you’re going to make a series called Secrets of the Penguins,” he says, “you’ve got to show people something they’ve never seen before.”

(Bertie Gregory’s filmmaking offers a front-row ticket to wildlife in action.)

But Gregory embraced the challenge. To film one of the series’ three episodes, he camped for more than two months near an emperor penguin colony in Antarctica’s Atka Bay. He was documenting a critical phase in a penguin’s life cycle, when juveniles, abandoned by their parents, are left to figure out how to become a “proper adult penguin,” getting themselves to the ocean to swim and hunt.

Gregory succeeded spectacularly in capturing behaviors never before filmed, including footage of hundreds of young emperor penguins entering the sea by “BASE jumping” off a 50-foot cliff. “I really think it’s going to blow people’s minds,” he says. “I thought I knew what penguins’ limits were. I was wrong.” 

(Why are these emperor penguin chicks jumping from a 50-foot cliff?)