LIFE Penguins

YOU NEVER FORGET your first penguin. Mine stood atop a white slab of ice, the tuxedoed groom on a wedding cake, looking back at our passing ship slicing through the Drake Passage from Argentina to Antarctica. Thousands more awaited on that frozen continent, where gregarious birds gazed into the GoPros of tourists in rubber Zodiacs making landfall on the rocky shore of the Antarctic Peninsula. Solicitous in their feathered dinner jackets, the Adelie penguins were outgoing and unflappable, nature’s maitre d’s. On another continent, in another year, I stood in Nelson Mandela’s former prison cell on Robben Island, off the windswept coast of Cape Town, in South Africa. The braying of African penguins had been a happy diversion to the political prisoners in their eight-by-seven concrete cells there. Ordered to…

NOT EVERY PENGUIN IS black and white. Little blues are the smallest (and bluest) penguins, while emperors are the largest, although that hasn’t always been the case. In 2014, researchers from La Plata Museum in Argentina discovered, on the Antarctic Peninsula, the fossilized remains of what has come to be called Palaeeudyptes klekowskii, the colossal penguin, which 37 million years ago stood—with its face raised to the sky, beak up—as tall as six feet seven inches, and weighed as much as 250 pounds. But much as the emperor is dwarfed by this prehistoric predecessor, the colossal penguin is cast in the shadow of an even more stupendous ancestor. In 2016 and 2017, Alan Tennyson, from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, found fossils on a beach that were…

LIKE GROOMSMEN IN TUXEDOES, individual penguins are not dressed to stand out in a crowd. “The idea behind the tuxedo is the woman’s point of view that men are all the same,” comedian Jerry Seinfeld famously observed. “So we might as well dress them that way. That’s why a wedding is like the joining together of a beautiful, glowing bride and some guy … That’s why the wedding vow isn’t ‘Do you take Bill Simpson?’ It’s ‘Do you take this man?’” And yet despite the anonymity of their black-and-white plumage, their mostly remote habitats, and a disinclination for hot lights, a few real-life penguins have managed to achieve widespread fame and lasting affection. Let us now praise famous penguins. Darwin’s Penguin Charles Darwin twice traveled to the Falkland Islands off…

PENGUINS HAVE SERVED AS artistic muses almost since humans first saw them. In 1985, on the walls of a flooded cave near Marseilles, French divers discovered depictions of penguins painted in the Stone Age, perhaps as long ago as 20,000 B.C.E. Penguin bones have been found in southern regions of Spain and Italy, from before the birds (and the continents) dispersed. Scattered to their mostly remote outposts, these creatures returned to the attention of the wider world in the age of exploration, in the 15th and 16th centuries, and became beloved again by artists, writers, and—eventually—by musicians, animators, and filmmakers. The English painter John Webber traveled with Captain James Cook on his third voyage to the South Pacific and drew, in 1777, a southern rockhopper penguin in profile, on the…

“GREAT GOD! THIS IS AN awful place,” the polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott wrote in his journal, of Antarctica, where he died in 1912 of exposure and starvation, in a blizzard that lasted 10 days. Average daily temperatures can range from 14 degrees Fahrenheit on the coast to minus 75 degrees inland. But Antarctica isn’t merely the coldest continent on earth. It is also the driest place, with annual precipitation of two inches a year. Captain James Cook circled the globe three times in the 1700s and didn’t care for this frozen desert any more than Scott did. The mission of Cook’s second voyage was to explore as far south as he could. In doing so, Cook penetrated the Antarctic Circle and found “thick fogs, snow storms, intense cold, and…

“FLIGHTLESS BIRD” SOUNDS LIKE an oxymoron, but there remain roughly 60 species of birds who, in the parlance of the aviation industry, remain grounded. Many of these birds once flew, but evolution stripped them of their ability or desire or need to fly. Others failed to evolve and went extinct, most famously the dodo, whose name has become shorthand for obsolete occupations or failed product launches. Could the penguin go the way of the dodo? The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, signed by 42 countries including the United States, has made it illegal to hunt penguins or to collect their eggs. There are no permanent human residents of Antarctica, and the most frequent visitors are engaged in scientific research. But there remain many other threats to these…