Penguin Awareness Day

What the day is

Penguin Awareness Day is observed on January 20. A separate World Penguin Day falls on April 25, so the calendar carries both.

Origin and background

The first thing to correct is geography. Penguins are not an Antarctic animal with a few outliers; they are a southern hemisphere animal, and only a couple of species breed on the Antarctic continent proper. The rest are spread across South America, southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the subantarctic islands, and one species lives at the equator in the Galápagos. No penguin is native to the Arctic, and penguins and polar bears have never shared a hemisphere, let alone a habitat.

The insulation is unusual. Penguin feathers are short, stiff and packed at a density far above most birds, forming a layer that traps air against the skin, with fat beneath as a second line. The air layer is the important part, and it is also why oiled penguins die: contaminated feathers lose their structure, the trapped air escapes, and the bird loses insulation rather than being poisoned.

The legs solve a harder problem. Standing on ice should drain body heat straight into the ground, and the answer is a counter-current arrangement in which arteries carrying warm blood down run alongside veins carrying cold blood back, so heat transfers across before it reaches the feet. The feet run cold deliberately, close to freezing, because a warm foot would be a heat leak.

Several species are in trouble, most severely the African penguin, whose population has collapsed through fishing pressure on its prey and historic guano removal that took away nesting material.

How to take part

• Learn where penguins actually live, which is the most commonly wrong fact about them.
• Support a seabird rescue organization, which handles oiling events.
• Check that the fish you buy is from a certified sustainable fishery.
• Watch footage of the counter-current circulation explained. It is elegant engineering.
• Visit an aquarium that funds field conservation rather than one that does not.