Each day as part of my iGoogle page I get a feed of jokes. Most are not my taste: I guess I prefer to laugh privately or perhaps it's that the whole joke set-up construct makes me nervous.
Who knows.
At any rate, today I got this joke from Comedy Central: Penguins go the zoo...
A man drives to a gas station and has his tank filled up. The gas pumper spots two penguins sitting in the back seat of the car.
He asks the driver, "What's up with the penguins in the back seat?"
The man in the car says "I found them. I asked myself what to do with them, but I haven't had a clue."
The clerk ponders a bit then says, "You should take them to the zoo."
"Hey, that's a good idea," says the man in the car and drives away.
The next day the man with the car is back at the same gas station. The clerk sees the penguins are still in the back seat of the car.
"Hey, they're still here! I thought you were going to take them to the zoo."
"Oh, I did," says the driver, "And we had a swell time. Today I am taking them to the beach."
The first thing that came to mind were the Magellanic penguins at the SF Zoo, a rather sad-looking bunch in their cement pond. Not so long ago, maybe five years or so, some new penguins born and bred in Ohio came aboard the island. This arrival triggered a massive "migration" of the original gang, who proceeded to swim as though making the long commute from northerly to southerly latitudes in wide open seas.
If I am in the right mood, these sorts of penguin stories can make me bawl.
This, of course, made me think of all the penguin stories I had heard from my friend, the Antarctic curator Baden Norris (he runs the Lyttelton Museum on New Zealand's South Island) -- who had also for many years run a bird hospital and nursed many penguins back to health. Penguins are endemic to New Zealand's South Island and actually considered something of a smelly mess.
One of my favorite stories was that of Percy the Penguin and I included in THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY as a field note.
Field Notes
I imagine if penguins were to study us the way we study them, they might be intrigued by how we adapt to and construct our habitats. Maybe they would investigate our habitat construction in places like New York. How we stack boxes of stone one on top of the other and then argue amongst ourselves about what colour the inside of these dens should be. How we change the den’s colour randomly. Or do we do so for other reasons? Perhaps, as scientists do in the Antarctic, they would be curious about whether or not helicopter noise disrupted our breeding habits. I don’t know about you, but I would feel disrupted by a helicopter full of penguins descending on my den, determined to shove a thermometer up my rear end and check my body temperature. Penguins may be the most carefully studied of all Antarctic wildlife and there was a lot of grumbling among Antarctic scientists about duplication and relevance. Yet penguins hold our attention in ways seals do not. Why is this so? And why do we insist on making them into comical little men in dinner suits, carrying silver trays of champagne? Baden had run a bird “hospital” for many years. As part of this, he had worked with the indigenous species called the blue or little penguin, Eudyptula minor, (the Maori name is korora, and it is the world’s smallest penguin. This penguin weighs about one kilo, or 2.2 pounds, and stands no more than 25 cm high. These penguins have suffered from gruesome predation, and introduced species like ferrets, stoats, weasels, house cats, and the family dog, make fast work of them. Among those in his care was a penguin that had arrived with a damaged bill and blind in one eye. Baden named him Percy and said he never could have survived again in the wild. While he lived with Baden, Percy got to know Baden’s cats, who came to treat the little bird with respect, and treat him as part of the household. Baden explained how other penguins were in hospital because they had become oil contaminated. To cure them, Baden gave them detergent baths, then carefully checked that all residue was removed. After about five weeks, most were ready to be reintroduced to the wild. They usually did not want to go, he added. He recalled one particular day when he had four to release, how he took them down to the beach and shooed them all toward the sea, then sat on the beach and watched them swim away. One by one, they came back to the beach and sat down next to him. Then the five watched the surf roll onto the beach at Sumner. Two penguins tired of this, and wandered back toward the waves, but the other two were quite determined to come home with Baden. So Baden brought them to the beach again the next day, and this time one turned from the waves. A few days later he, too, agreed to swim out to sea. Returning to the sea was no longer an option for Percy. He came to have a taste for cat food and enjoyed daily swims with Baden in the surf. Percy rode to the beach in the boot, or trunk, of Baden’s white car. When they finished their swim, Percy waddled back to the car park. He always knew which car was ours, he was a smart penguin, Baden recalled. I pictured the two of them rolling in the turquoise South Pacific waters. So Percy lived his half-penguin, half-human life making a comfortable nest in the cold furnace in the basement. During one of the South Island’s torrential rainstorms, he was moulting, and water surged into his moulting area and by the time Baden found him, he was ice-cold and water logged. Wrapped in shawls and held tight, Percy died. Down the coast from Baden’s home, many years later, the town of Oamaru became home to a set of wooden burrows and bleachers, a habitat restoration project with spectators, where tourists paid to watch penguins emerge from the sea as night descended. They hopped up the rocky beach. When we visited, one turned towards where I sat with my children and came to within a few feet of us, looking steadily at our family. Then the penguin turned towards the hills and began to climb towards the burrows. In the gift shop, we bought small plastic replicas of the little blue penguins. They were made in China and stood as tall as my thumb.
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