Who doesn’t love penguins?  What is it that we love about them?  They are so cute.  Is it because they are clumsy and awkward?  They are a hunting machine in the water.  They swim so fast that’s it’s hard to follow them.  They dart back and forth and jump out of the water like dolphins.  They are so graceful.  Their bodies are perfectly adapted to swimming.  Then they pop out of the water and hit the land and it’s a totally different bird.  Their little legs aren’t quite meant for walking so they waddle around.  They hold their flippers out, probably for balance which makes them look even sillier.  This doesn’t seem to help a lot with their balance as they still seem to fall over or face plant a lot.  They aren’t walking on flat ground either.  Some penguins build their nests high up in the rocks and getting up and back from there would be tough for a human, but they hop, scoot, waddle and fall down getting there.  After watching them for several days, I’m convinced they are confused most of the time.  Remember that feeling when you walk into a room and stop, cock you head to the side and ask “why did I come in here?”  I think a lot of penguins are in a constant state of “what was I just doing?”, “how did I get here?” or “where was I going?”  I would watch them waddle along, stop and look around and then head back the way they just came from – over and over.  The penguins you see in the zoo or in pictures are all black and white and shiny.  What no one tells you is that most of the time penguins are dirty, covered in their own filth.  Only the penguins running around in snow or just coming out of the water were black and white.  The others were black and pink and not a pretty, girly shade of pink. As you can imagine, there’s a certain smell the goes along with these pink penguins.  As we would approach an island from the zodiacs, you’d think “mmmm smells like penguins”.  Penguins are loud, but as you can tell from my videos below, not as loud as us humans.  We saw a few babies, but none up close.  They weren’t old enough to stray far from the nests yet.  You needed binoculars to see them, but they sure were adorable little fluff balls running around the nest in random spurts of frantic energy.  They were testing their legs and flapping their flippers, probably building up the muscle strength for future swimming. On the last day we sat in front of a bunch of nests for about and hour and watched the penguin show.  I could have watched for hours more. The adult penguins that were wandering around had no care in the world that we were there.  They would waddle within inches of you if you weren’t paying attention to what was behind or beside you.  What a wonderful experience to be able to see them in their natural habitat where none of them were afraid of us because we are not predators.  I really hope it stays that way.

 

I took a lot more videos than pictures – enjoy!