For the Birds Radio Program: Humboldt Penguin in Alaska?!
On July 30, an Anchorage newspaper reported that a Humboldt Penguin ended up in a fishing net in Alaska!
Transcript
When my children were little and going through their dinosaur and natural history phase, their favorite riddle was “Why don’t polar bears ever eat penguins?” Grown-ups would often guess things like that penguins taste bad or are too speedy to be caught, but the answer is that penguins aren’t found in the northern hemisphere, and polar bears aren’t found in the southern hemisphere.
Lucky the kids never asked any Alaskan fishermen the riddle. Because on July 30, 2002, an Anchorage news station reported that the crew of a fishing vessel near Prince of Wales Island found a penguin amid the fish pulled in by a seiner net. It stood about 20 inches tall, and waddled around the deck. One of the crew members released it back into the sea.
A penguin expert at the University of Washington identified the bird as a Humboldt Penguin. I’m not sure if the identification was based on photographs or the crew’s description. But this is the first time any penguin has ever been documented in Alaska, or, indeed, in any of the United States, including Hawaii. Penguins have virtually never been reported in the Northern Hemisphere anywhere, so the situation has ornithologists baffled. No one knows if this was one very lost individual penguin or if it was in a group. I would guess that the El Nino currents that have been bringing unusual southern fish and other ocean creatures to the California coast is at least partly responsible.
Humboldt Penguins are found along the desert coastline of Chile and Peru, and on offshore islands in that region. The only other countries where it’s been recorded naturally are in Colombia and Ecuador. Although one might think that the weather on the South American coast is balmy, the Peruvian shore is swept by the frigid Humboldt current. This icy ocean stream is historically extraordinarily rich in fish, but overfishing in good years has been threatening Humboldt Penguins since the 1800s, when the growing commercial anchovy fishery off the Peruvian coast depleted the penguins’ primary food source. And El Nino events carry the rich supply of fish away from them, and have long been known to hurt the Humboldt Penguin population. To add insult to injury, Humboldt’s were brought even closer to the edge of extinction in the 1800s thanks to guano collectors, who stripped the nitrogen-rich soil from their offshore breeding islands, leaving the poor penguins nowhere to burrow for nesting.
Despite the problems they face in the natural world, Humboldt Penguins are one of the most adaptable as far as their temperature needs go, so they are one of the most popular zoo penguins. They were captured by the thousands to supply zoos around the world until the Peruvian government finally made that illegal-now the only ways zoos can get them is through captive breeding programs.
El Nino events are natural, but are growing ever more dramatic as our little planet heats up. The Southern California Marine Institute has been amassing a list of unusual fish sightings in southern California this year, and finding an unprecedented number of southern fish, some from as far away as the Peruvian coastline. We’ll never know what became of Alaska’s first Humboldt Penguin. It’s ironic and sad that this one appeared the same year as Alaskan glaciers are melting away.