Penguin Awareness Day

"I'm a penguin and I'm a bird,

I'm a penguin and I'm a bird,

I'm a penguin and I'm a bird, and I can fly!"

- Great Big Sea, "Horatio the Penguin"

Happy Penguin Awareness Day!

(Why do some zoo animals get their own days (i.e., penguins, rhinos, elephants) and others don't?  When is International Asian Hornbill Day, or National Chameleon Day?)

There are - depending on who you ask - seventeen or eighteen or so species of penguin, ranging from the stately emperors of the Antarctic to the little blue fairies of Australia.  They are found in southern oceans from the icy southern seas to almost the equator off the coast of Ecuador.  All are flightless, but only in the sense that they can't soar through the air.  Seen underwater, as many zoos and aquariums provide the opportunity to do, they really do fly...

Many zoo visitors gloss over birds, but penguins hold a star-power that rivals big cats, primates, and pachyderms.  Zoo and aquarium collections tend to feature the penguins of the temperate zone - the African penguin and Humboldt's penguins, especially - since these are the species that are the hardiest in warm weather (as a kid, it seriously blew my mind to learn that there were penguins in Africa).  Antarctic penguins, hailing from a frozen land too cold for germs, tend to sicken and decline when kept in warm weather; zoos that do keep these species generally house them in special climate controlled environments.

Like pretty much every other species on earth except for man and his ecological associates, the penguins of the world are in decline.  Their food sources are being fished out to dangerously low levels, leaving penguins unable to feed their young.  Their nest sites are being destroyed by guano harvesters, who use the birds' droppings for fertilizer.  Climate change threatens to drastically change their marine food chains.  Oil spills ruin their feathers.  Floating trash strangles and suffocates them.

A lot of people don't realize it, but the bird that first received the name "penguin" wasn't, in fact, a penguin.  It was the great auk, a giant flightless alcid (puffin-relative) from the North Atlantic.  You'll never see a great auk at the zoo, though - the last one was strangled to death in 1844, the egg is was incubating smashed underfoot.  When Europeans encountered other black-and-white, flightless sea birds in the southern oceans, they passed the name down to the "new" penguins.

Penguins inherited their name from the great auk.  Hopefully they won't share its fate.