Penguins

Penguins always fascinate, waddling on land, flying gracefully under the water, and my son's young friend  was rather awe-struck when I told him there are live penguins in Sydney Harbour.  They nest near his home, hiding under rock shelves on the shore, and hissing if you approach them on land.  Their breath stinks of fish, and they are clumsy on the land, but they are delightfully graceful ‘flyers’ under the water.  But you have to know where to look for them, and what to look for.

A fairy penguin is also called a ‘little penguin’, but not around Sydney.  We see the occasional rockhopper and fiordland penguin here, but fairy penguins are our common ones.  As a boy, I used to try chasing penguins in a dinghy, but it was impossible, they were just too fast.  On land, it is another matter, and now penguins can only nest where the feral cats and foxes cannot get to them.

Last time I was at Taronga Zoo, the zoo penguins were being herded into an enclosure for the night as we left, to make them safe from the zoo's feral foxes. The ones on the coasts around Manly are guarded by volunteers.

Their name is Welsh (pen = head, gwyn = white), but this puzzles me, for penguins never go north of the equator.  Recently, somebody told me that the original penguin is the auk of the Atlantic.  But while the name comes from the Welsh for ‘white head’, all penguins have black heads.  The auks are real ‘penguins’, for the guillemot has a whiter head in summer, the puffin (very Welsh, that one) is almost entirely made up of a white face.

Another puzzle: why do so many penguins have flashes of yellow to offset the severe black-and-white patterning? The black and white pattern would make them less visible to predators, but yellow makes no sense at all.  It must be their resemblance to waiters that makes them so attractive, and I find it interesting that cartoony penguins never show any signs of yellow at all.

Our Eudyptula minor is the smallest of them all, found only in southern Australia and New Zealand.  They weigh about 1 kilo (2.2 pounds) and stand 30 cm high.  They are dark blue to black on the upper body and white on the lower part.

The Australian sub-species is distinguished from the New Zealand ones by having a margin of white feathers on the tail and on the rear edge of each flipper, though penguin experts can be easily persuaded to brawl about just how many species and sub-species there are.

Fairy penguins come ashore after dark, showing their infinite variety of calls, ranging from guttural growls to loud screams and noisy trumpeting.  They live for about 7 years and some keep the same mate for life.  They lay two white eggs in spring, the male and female share incubation, and the chicks are helpless for 2-3 weeks after hatching, needing brooding.

After that time, both parents leave the nest to collect food.  By 8 weeks, the chicks have lost their down and grown waterproof plumage that they need to go to sea themselves.  They mainly hunt schooling fish and squid in surface waters.

They can see both above and below water (not an easy trick!), there is no external ear visible, but they communicate a lot by sound, the flippers are NOT waterproof, the feet are webbed with three claws, and there is an oil gland above the base of the tail.  Without this, they would not be waterproof.

The gland produces liquid waxes (honest!) when massaged with the beak.  The adult birds undergo an annual moult in late summer when they change over all their plumage, and this keeps them on shore for two or three weeks, while they live on fat reserves, sometimes dropping to half their starting weight.

Most people compare penguins to waiters in evening dress, but I relate more to the Antarctic ones which leap up out of the sea onto the ice as they come ashore.  When they are ready to go out to sea again, these penguins all wait on the edge of the ice for somebody else to go first, fearing the leopard seals that are lurking beneath the ice floe.

In my many years of work as a bureaucrat, that image of the penguins standing, shuffling and jostling, was constantly with me, though I could never explain why.

They were just, I would say, going with the floe, and getting cold feet — and that is why bureaucracies fail, at least until a few surrealist anarchists land among them.