Aptenodytes forsteri

This week we had a very special visitor.

A ticking a tick box event.
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My winter is made.

Majestically approaching the base with their unique waddle was a giant from the penguin, and bird world in general. Its distinctive gold patches on its ear and on top of their chest, the claxon sounding cry left us in no doubt an Emperor penguin was in our midst. We bowed.

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Like our regular compatriots, the Adelie, the Emperor is the only other penguin that makes the Antarctic continent their true home, living and breeding nowhere else. If the Adelie are the comical, Charlie Chaplin type figures of the penguin community, the Emperor is the sophisticate. Such grace. This young chap was about a year old, but over a metre tall and he was stunning, and he knew it!!!

I had mentally resigned myself to the fact that I probably would not get to see an Emperor, they only usually travel over sea ice, and as Adelaide Island is still cut off from the mainland with open water, he must therefore have swam here. I will never moan about a journey or commute again.

Penguin particulars: Penguins make up a substantial proportion of the entire avian community, up to 80% of the Antarctica biomass. Modern day species are flightless, but that hasn’t always been the case. Today’s penguins evolved from birds similar to diving-petrels, and there are almost 40 different species in the fossil record.

The Emperor is the largest of the penguins, although they are the least common Antarctic penguins, with only about 200,000 breeding pairs. Antarctic penguins are however very abundant, probably due to the remoteness of their breeding grounds, and so their future is not under any immediate threat.

But they are very sensitive to climatic change, in terms of the changing environment in which they live and the sensitive changes in their food supply of fish, krill and squid in the Southern Ocean. The fossil record shows past climatic change may have caused the extinction of many penguin species.

I feel the Adelie will always have the softest spot in my heart on the penguin front, they are our true constant, loyal companions and the most wonderful creatures, but I feel very humbled to have met my first Emperor though.

With the exception of our little buddy below (who I think I’ll call Bernard) Emperor penguins are the only birds that normally do not set foot on land. They live and breed on frozen sea!

What a cool bird!