Strange bird who loves cold

SOME people hate their jobs; they’d prefer to be film stars, great artists or captains of industry.

Animals too have their square pegs in round holes; ostriches wish they were horses, squirrels flit birdlike in the tree-tops and whales would prefer to be fish. Perhaps the most extreme rejection of their ancient heritage is found among penguins. They see themselves as dolphins.

Aping sea mammals was an excellent career choice for penguins; most of the 19 species are thriving. However, ‘the times they are a changing’ and things may be less rosy in future, or so a paper in the October edition of Scientific American argues. In The Strangest Bird, R. Ewan Fordyce and Daniel T. Ksepka discuss the evolution of these iconic birds. The title is apt; penguins are an odd bunch. Flightless and fat, they travel the oceans, plunge diving for fish and krill. Two satellite-tagged Magellanic penguins covered 300,000km in nine years. Meeting up each summer to breed, they were declared, last week, to be ‘the most monogamous creatures on earth’.