Marching with Penguins: How to Celebrate and Protect Our Adorable Feathered Friends
Guest Blog
By Jessica Barder on April 25, 2022
Adélies on a piece of sea ice off Hut Point, Ross Island, Antarctica. Photo supplied by this blog’s author, Jessica Barder. All Rights Reserved.
When Tiffany asked me to guest post on her blog for World Penguin Day, my first thought was that my community is definitely not the target audience for World Penguin Day.
My next thought was to realise that, somehow and wholly unintentionally, I have spent the last decade living in communities where penguins are part of the everyday landscape. Thus, there is no single special day to “raise awareness” about these weird, wonderful little creatures because every day requires a certain amount of awareness of them. So perhaps I shouldn’t feel badly that I had to go look up the date for World Penguin Day?
Basically, I have mad penguin privilege. Which is probably why Tiffany tapped me for this.
Who am I? Well, I’m not a research scientist although I know plenty of penguin scientists in both personal and professional capacities. Instead, I manage a team of science communicators for Tūhura Otago Museum, based in Ōtepoti Dunedin, in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Tūhura Otago Museum has the largest science centre and largest science engagement outreach team in the country. Photo supplied by author. All Rights Reserved.
Prior to moving here just over 7 years ago, I worked as a chef, which took me on multiple sojourns to US bases in Antarctica.
Arriving in Antarctica via C-17. Photo supplied by author. All Rights Reserved.
Penguins being part of the landscape in Antarctica shouldn’t come as a galloping shock to anyone, thanks to mainstream media. We have Happy Feet and the March of the Penguins to thank for that and I actually first fell in love with the idea of going to Antarctica and seeing penguins thanks to Madeleine L’Engle’s book Troubling a Star, which is largely set on a cruise to the Antarctic Peninsula, just south of South America.
Adélies on a piece of sea ice off Hut Point, Ross Island, Antarctica. Photo supplied by author. All Rights Reserved.
And I did indeed get to see penguins during my time in Antarctica, though only while I was at McMurdo Station, on Ross Island. I saw no penguins at the South Pole, which makes sense when you realise that the geographic South Pole is over 9000 feet (2800m) above sea level and more than 700 miles (1200 km) from the nearest coastline – for a bird that doesn’t fly, it might as well as be the moon.
Approached by Adélies while assisting with data collection on the sea ice. Regulations dictate humans must not do anything that might cause the wildlife to alter their behaviour. Photo supplied by author. All Rights Reserved.
But perhaps it will come as a surprise (I dare say, raise some awareness?) for some readers to learn that since I moved to Ōtepoti Dunedin in 2015, my exposure to penguins has actually increased.
This is because out of the 17 to 19 species of penguins that exist today (there is some debate over what is considered a distinct species), 13 to 15 of them can actually be found in Aotearoa New Zealand as compared to the eight that are found in Antarctica.
Depiction of the Ross Dependency. Photo by TUBS via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0
(In the interest of full disclosure: the New Zealand government claims a slice of Antarctica known as the Ross Dependency, shown in red above. So the NZ count includes the Chinstrap, Adélie, and Emperor penguin species found there. But even discounting those three species still leaves anywhere from 10 to 12 different species found in New Zealand, some of which are found nowhere else in the world.)
In fact, the region of the South Island where I live hosts breeding grounds for the widely distributed and less threatened (but still declining) kororā (little blue penguin)....
Kororā is te reo Māori for blueish-grey – an apt name for the tiniest of penguins. Photo by Peter. CC BY-NC 2.0.
....as well as one of the rarest and most ancient penguin species in the world: the hoiho or yellow-eyed penguin.
A piece of Ōtepoti Dunedin street art by artist Bruce Mahalski featuring hoiho/yellow-eyed penguins.
Photo by Like_the_Grand_Canyon. CC BY-NC 2.0
Hoiho translates roughly to “noisy shouter”, a tribute to its rather alarming call, while its English name references its yellow eyes in a mask of yellow feathers. The last of its genus, the most recent data collected indicates that fewer than 225 breeding pairs are left in the entire world. Even winning New Zealand Bird of the Year in 2019 hasn’t managed to slow the population’s decline.
As in Antarctica, South America, Australia, the Galapagos, and anywhere else penguins are found, the biggest threat to Aotearoa New Zealand’s penguins is human activities. We are seeing the impacts from large-scale farming operations contaminating waterways which flow into ocean hunting grounds, nesting habitats destroyed by erosion, ocean warming and acidification driven by increasing CO2 concentrations in the air make it harder to find food, and, particularly in areas where human settlements abut breeding grounds, species have to contend with predation by introduced mammals, including by people’s pets.
Hoiho heading into the dunes where their nests are. Photo by Hanna Ravn. All Rights Reserved.
All of these issues are a major part of the political and social landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand. For us, supporting penguin conservation efforts can be as simple as going for a walk on the beach where penguins are known to come ashore, and reminding a passerby to keep their dog under control.
Hoiho coming in from fishing to feed their chicks – flightless, ground-nesting birds are easy targets for unleashed dogs. Photo by Hanna Ravn. All Rights Reserved.
💡 But for all of you out there whose daily lives don’t regularly feature some aspect of penguin conservation, World Penguin Day is a great opportunity to get links and resources in front of you, to grow your knowledge about these birds that live on the edge quite literally: not just of our planet but the edge of extinction and possibly even garner your support to save these tāoka (treasured) species.
The Tawaki or Fiordland Crested Penguin of Aotearoa New Zealand remains highly elusive and understudied. Photo by Jake Osborne. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
For example, if you want to stick to the classic Antarctic species favoured by the mainstream media, but gain a more accurate picture of their true nature, I highly recommend reading A Polar Affair by Lloyd Spencer Davis - it dives into the story George Murray Levick, the very first penguin research scientist and a member of Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition to Antarctica whose research was buried for almost a hundred years due to the sexual depravities and misadventures it revealed as being a common occurrence in penguin colonies. March of the Penguins, this is not.
If you want to do something for all the species, the most important thing you can do is reduce your carbon footprint (which really is in your own best interest as well), but I feel like strategies for that can be found on many, many, many other blogs and websites so I’ll not rehash them here.
Lastly, if you want to more directly support penguin conservation efforts here on the South Island, I can highly recommend the conservation and research being done by the following organisations:
https://www.wildlifehospitaldunedin.org.nz/donate
https://www.yellow-eyedpenguin.org.nz/support/support-donate/donations/donate-online/
https://www.tawaki-project.org/support-us/
Happy World Penguin Day!
About Tiffany
Dr. Tiffany Vora speaks, writes, and advises on how to harness technology to build the best possible future(s). She is an expert in biotech, health, & innovation.
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