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All dressed up, and nowhere to go but the South Pole
By Carl Heintze
It's the Year of the Penguin.
Not since Admiral Byrd brought back film of these birds--more like fish than birds--from the South Pole a few decades ago have we seen so much of them.
They're in movies, they are in commercials on television, they are dolls for the young and jokes for the old. They have become a permanent part of our social mores.
Most of their exposure has been on movie screens.
First some French photographers spent the better part of a year almost freezing to death to record The March of the Penguins.
This beautifully done film, narrated by Morgan Freeman, was a sleeper hit on the movie theater screens of art houses all over the country.
Then someone turned them into an animated film in which they sing, cavort all over the snow and ice and seem more like a set of tuxedo-clad waiters than birds. Where they'll go next is anybody's guess. But I wouldn't be surprised it they don't star in a drawing room comedy. They certainly are dressed for it.
Just why all this has happened is as puzzling as penguins themselves.
Penguins live only at or near the South Pole. (Well, some do migrate north to the coast of South America in certain parts of the year, but they are the exception. Most penguins spend their lives in Antarctica standing on ice or swimming through icy waters in search of food.)
Penguins come in a variety of sizes from giant emporers, who are really big, to tiny little relatives.
In general, they all look about the same, as if they had just donned a tux for a party. Their breasts are white and their backs are black.
They are comedians. They don't walk so much as they waddle over the snow and ice. But once they dive into the water, they are as agile as fish. It's almost as if they can't make up their minds where they belong.
They need to fish to survive, but they aren't aquatic enough to spend all their lives in the water.
The way they raise their young--the theme of The March of the Penguins-- defies logic. The mother lays one egg, broods it in her feathers between her legs. Then she turns this job over to the dad. Talk about stay-at-home fathers! The father stands around with the egg between its legs through good weather and bad huddling against his neighbor, acting as a surrogate mother, while the real mother treks about 40 miles (one way) to the nearest open ocean to feed up on fish.
Then she walks back (or rather waddles). In the meantime the chick has appeared and if all goes well mother arrives home in time to regurgitate the fish she's eaten to feed her baby.
Then everyone heads for the coast and the open ocean.
Not all penguins go through this ritual, but all live in or near the ocean all their lives, traveling in flocks either in or out of the water. Most never get out of the Antarctic, where they are prey to leopard seals. They seem not to have many other natural enemies except the weather.
And they've never made it to the Arctic.
But some folks, so I've heard, think they have.
A certain California college, which shall remain nameless, recently decided to enter a float in a parade with the Arctic as its theme. Someone added penguins to the float.
Fortunately, someone caught the error before the float got very far, but the hue and cry over whether penguins lived in the Arctic reached all the way to the office of the college president.
I'm not sure how it was all solved, but it is my understanding that the penguins stayed even if they were in the wrong hemisphere.
Puzzling over this and why we have become so entranced with these odd aquatic birds, I have come to the conclusion that we admire them so much because they seem so much like us. Standing in the freezing Antarctic wind tending an egg between their legs is not so much dumber than a lot of things humans do.
Like putting penguins somewhere north of the Arctic Circle.
