Five pairs of rubbery feet carry velvet-sheathed black-and-white bodies towards the rope line separating the king penguins from the dozen or so visitors, who look on in awe. As these emissaries shuffle over, a hundred of their cohorts parade on a nearby bank, splashing around in the water and regurgitating food into their chicks\u2019 open beaks.<\/p>\n
The king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus) makes its home almost exclusively on islands in the Southern Ocean. But it has been coming to this wind-battered bay in southern Chile\u2019s Tierra del Fuego region for hundreds of years, probably because its shallow shores offer protection from marine predators and humans.<\/p>\n
Useless Bay was so called because its shallow shores made landing boats nearly impossible. Photograph: Anastasia Austin\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
Early explorers named it Useless Bay<\/a> because those same shores made landing boats, including industrial fishing vessels, nearly impossible. Still, humans remained such a threat that no permanent colony of king penguins formed here until 2010<\/a>. Then, as a colony started to develop, a local landowner and former kindergarten teacher Cecilia Dur\u00e1n Gafo, now 72, decided she would protect them.<\/p>\n double quotation mark<\/p>\n They dressed them up in caps and sunglasses, and took selfies. Horrible things<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Cecilia Dur\u00e1n Gafo<\/p>\n Today, she runs a reserve<\/a> that oversees the only continental king penguin colony in the world, one that has grown from a handful of penguins to nearly 200.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was only thanks to the reserve that [the penguins] got a safe space where they could build up and establish a colony,\u201d says Dr Klemens P\u00fctz, scientific director at the Antarctic Research Trust.<\/p>\n Dur\u00e1n\u2019s reserve is part of a growing global trend. A 2022 study in Nature Ecology and Evolution<\/a>, assessing more than 15,000 private protected areas, found they helped to conserve underrepresented biomes and highly threatened regions that government action alone could not reach.<\/p>\n Cecilia Dur\u00e1n Gafo first found king penguins nesting on her land in the early 1990s. Photograph: Anastasia Austin\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The first time Dur\u00e1n found king penguins nesting on her land was in the early 1990s. But soon after, she says, people claiming to be scientists arrived to take the birds away.<\/p>\n \u201cThey put [the penguins] in cages, and took them to Japan \u2026 supposedly for scientific research. Later, we found out [most] had gone to zoos [or homes] as pets,\u201d Dur\u00e1n says.<\/p>\n After that, the penguins avoided settling in the bay for more than a decade. And when they reappeared overnight in 2010, Dur\u00e1n says, people began stealing eggs and mistreating them again almost immediately. \u201cThey dressed them up in caps and sunglasses, and took selfies,\u201d she recalls. \u201cHorrible things.\u201d<\/p>\n The population quickly collapsed. Of the 90 king penguins, only eight remained a year later.<\/p>\n Dur\u00e1n called a family meeting, convinced they had to do something to protect the penguins. \u201cBut who was going to do it? \u2018Mom! my two daughters said in unison.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Dur\u00e1n, who heads the reserve, with her daughter Aurora. Photograph: Anastasia Austin\/The Guardian<\/p>\n So she began patrolling the beach. \u201cEvery day I came out here with a thermos and a sandwich. I\u2019d spend the whole day, frozen to the bone \u2026 making sure people didn\u2019t disturb the penguins.\u201d<\/p>\n The next year, Dur\u00e1n fenced off 30 hectares (74 acres) of her nearly 1,000-hectare farm as a protected area, allowing visitors to watch the penguins, but only from a distance.<\/p>\n Keeping humans out was only half the battle, though. Minks<\/a> and grey foxes<\/a>, invasive species introduced to Tierra del Fuego in the 20th century, posed a novel threat to the penguins, which have no natural land predators.<\/p>\n When people claiming to be scientists took some of the birds away the rest of the colony avoided the area for more than a decade. Photograph: Anastasia Austin\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cThe mink doesn\u2019t attack the adults, but goes for the chicks and the eggs. At first, only one or two penguin chicks survived. Then we started our years-long battle,\u201d says Dur\u00e1n.<\/p>\n For the first decade, Dur\u00e1n\u2019s solution was simple: lure the predators away, especially in winter, when adult penguins forage at sea for weeks at a time, leaving the chicks unprotected.<\/p>\n By then, she had a small team. They would buy offcuts from local butchers, split the night into two-hour shifts, and distribute meat scraps far from the reserve, conditioning the predators to hunt elsewhere.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was wonderful because the nights were so full of stars, but the 3am shift, oof,\u201d she remembers. \u201cI went out anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n Minks and foxes threatened the colony at first but the reserve\u2019s team trained the predators to hunt elsewhere using meat scraps. Photograph: Anastasia Austin\/The Guardian<\/p>\n They also started using dogs. \u201cThey go out in the morning and afternoon [to mark the territory] \u2026 So the fox or the mink smells it and leaves,\u201d Dur\u00e1n says.<\/p>\n Over time, the reserve also became more professional. In 2011, Dur\u00e1n started the process of legally turning the 30 hectares into a reserve for the next 100 years. \u201cWhoever inherits has to continue the conservation project,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Her 12-person onsite team now includes biologists, veterinarians and ecotourism specialists. Ecotourism funds the operation, with an average of 15,000 visitors a year.<\/p>\n Ecotourism funds the reserve, which has an average of 15,000 visitors a year. Photograph: Anastasia Austin\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The team also regularly collaborates with universities to contribute to scientific penguin, bird and plant life<\/a> research. Data collected<\/a> has revealed that king penguins from colonies thousands of kilometres away are coming to the bay. These new arrivals immediately adapt to the local diet, in what scientists call \u201cexceptional foraging plasticity\u201d.<\/p>\n The finding is significant: that plasticity \u201ccould hopefully help them to survive major human-driven climate impacts\u201d, says P\u00fctz, the study\u2019s lead author.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Dur\u00e1n is seeing evidence that her approach is paying off, with more chicks fledging as the most tangible result. \u201cLast year, 23 chicks survived \u2013 a record,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Find more age of extinction coverage here<\/a>, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston<\/a> and Patrick Greenfield<\/a> in the Guardian app for more nature coverage<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five pairs of rubbery feet carry velvet-sheathed black-and-white bodies towards the rope line separating the king penguins from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":959288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3847],"tags":[70,16,15,1717],"class_list":{"0":"post-959287","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116573008486599076","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=959287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/959288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=959287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=959287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=959287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}