Researchers have found a new colony of Emperor penguins, boosting the worldwide Emperor population to about 200,000 birds spread over 46 colonies. The colony featured in March of the Penguins is within earshot of a French research station. By contrast, the new colony is on the edge of an island in a rarely-traveled part of the continent.
The parents of Toga, the Jackass penguin chick peng-napped just before Christmas, have hatched another egg. The new chick is being sent to South Africa, the native habitat of the Jackasses, to be introduced to the wild. Before you pity poor Oscar and Kyala for not getting a break in raising a chick, that was where Toga was headed prior to his peng-napping. Rather than spending life as an exhibit in a zoo, the new chick will be released into the wild to do its part in buoying up the wild penguin population.
Penguins are featured in the current issue of Mental_Floss magazine. A 2-page spread discusses the penguin inhabitants of the Falkland Islands, including their stint as fuel for the whalers' rendering vats (who would have guessed penguins were flammable?) and their current use of minefields as nesting areas. Penguins, unlike humans or sheep, the other two big populations on the islands, are not heavy enough to trip the mines. International treaties call for all minefields to be cleared by next year, but some in the Falklands have proposed clearing an equal number of land mines in a higher-risk area elsewhere on the globe and leaving the well-marked Falkland Island minefields to the penguins. Apparently, land mines are an effective deterrent to tourists getting too close to nesting penguins.
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