These funny little things, with their funny little waddles:
Emperor Down!
These funny little things are just the most interesting of birds, and there are so many different varieties and have represented in all sorts of forms.
Did you know:
- Penguins can drink sea water. Penguins ingest a lot of seawater while hunting for fish, but a special gland behind their eyes—the supraorbital gland—filters out the saltwater from their blood stream. Penguins excrete it through their beaks, or by sneezing.
- The Emperor Penguin is the tallest of all penguin species, reaching as tall as 120 cm (47 in) in height.
- Little Blue Penguins are the smallest type of penguin, averaging around 33 cm (13 in) in height.
- A Penguin’s black and white plumage serves as camouflage while swimming. The black plumage on their back is hard to see from above, while the white plumage on their front looks like the sun reflecting off the surface of the water when seen from below.
- Penguins in Antarctica have no land based predators.
- Fossils place the earliest penguin relative at some 60 million years ago, meaning an ancestor of the birds we see today survived the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.
- If a female Emperor Penguin’s baby dies, she will often “kidnap” an unrelated chick.
- The first published account of penguins comes from Antonio Pigafetta, who was aboard Ferdinand Magellan’s first circumnavigation of the globe in 1520. They spotted the animals near what was probably Punta Tombo in Argentina. (He called them “strange geese.”)
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