A king penguin has made its way from the Antarctic region to the South Australian coastline, where it is likely to stay on land to undergo a “catastrophic moult”.
Members of a local birdwatching society were surprised when they spotted the bird on a beach, thousands of kilometres from its usual habitat.
Each year, the penguins lose all their feathers. Then, over two or three weeks, they replace them with sleek, freshly oiled, waterproof ones. For those weeks, they have no protection from the icy waters so they seek land – but usually much closer to home.
The chair of Friends of Shorebirds South East, Jeff Campbell, was part of a group of eight people doing a bird survey along the Coorong beach when they spotted the penguin.
“We came across a penguin coming up out of the water and on to the beach … a large penguin,” he said.
“It came right up to us. It was displaying to us, doing what birders call an advertising display. It put its head back and made a braying call, quite loud, then bowed to us.
“It did it several times. It came right up to us … right beside us … you shouldn’t approach these things but it approached us.”
Campbell said it was “quite a surprise” but not totally unheard of – a king penguin was spotted at Port MacDonnell, near Mount Gambier, in 2004.
The bird looked “very healthy, very chubby”, he said.
King penguins are close relatives of the larger emperor penguins, but prefer the subantarctic islands to the Antarctic ice shelf.
The Macquarie Island Conservation Foundation describes them as “curious, social birds that breed in colonies”. Like the emperor penguin, they lay a single egg which they incubate tucked on top of their foot, covered with a brood pouch (a flexible flap of skin).
There are about 120,000 king penguin pairs on Macquarie Island, which is about halfway between Tasmania and the Antarctic.
Dr Julie McInnes, from the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, Ecology and Biodiversity, suspects that might be where the visitor is from.
“From time to time penguins do come up to the mainland … often they’re coming in to moult,” she said.
“They come ashore for their catastrophic moult.”
It’s called a catastrophic moult because, unlike other birds that might shed some feathers, penguins lose all of them.
“So they come ashore for two to three weeks. They lose all their feathers and replace them with new, waterproof feathers,” McInnes said.
“They’re not waterproof in that time, so they come in fat and well rounded, because they’re fasting for those weeks when they’re ashore. Energetically it’s quite costly to moult so they just need to sit quietly with their feet in water, that’s their ideal set-up.”
She said the Australian mainland was the furthest reach of their range, and that while global heating was causing changes in penguins’ distribution, that would probably cause them to seek cooler water.
It could also just be that the penguin got off track looking for land – usually they would moult on their colony’s island.
“If it’s moulting it can’t go into the water, so it’s unfortunate that it found a fairly populous spot,” McInnes said.
Anyone wanting to see it should do so from a distance, she said, and not risk scaring it into the water.
“They’ll waterproof the feathers – they’ve got a preen gland, they’ll put the oil through their feathers so they can head back out again,” she said.
“It’s a long way from home – so we hope that’s what happens.”
