penguins – ZooTab Blog

Can you find Claudia?

Over the last month I’ve tried to get pictures of Claudia 3 times. However, she has not been cooperating. After talking with one of the keepers I found out that she is working on becoming a mom and has laid an egg. Presumably she is spending a good amount of time in one of the dens caring for that egg.

All of the penguins can be identified by different colored tags on their wings. Males usually have tags on the right and females usually have them on the left. Claudia has a pale pink band with a small red tab on her left wing.

Can you find Claudia? If so, please considering commenting below and uploading an image. I’d love to see it.

Artistic Penguin

We had an amazing experience where we got to go behind these scenes and meet a few of the penguins.

Claudia is an artist. You can see it in her eyes before getting to work:

This is the aftermath of her artistry:

Below is the final art hanging on the wall at my house:

One of my favorite pieces of art that we own. I have her on our local artists wall. 🙂

Baby Penguins!

Currently at WPZ we have 6 baby penguins. Q13 did a story on them a few days ago, the article has a video and it’s definitely worth watching. As one of the penguin keepers told us during a presentation; since the new penguin exhibit opened 56 of the 58 chicks were successfully raised and he didn’t know of anyone that did that with chickens let alone penguins.

Punta Tombo

Punta Tombo is a newly defined (December 2015) Protected Area (PA) on the coast of Argentina and is the largest nesting site for Magellanic Penguins in the world. These are close relatives of our Humboldt Penguins here at WPZ. See how similar they are below?

Magellanic Penguin

Humboldt Penguin

What I think is special about this PA is that it not only protects the land and costal area, but also the waters around it. As Professor Boersma from UW said “This has to be one of the few marine protected areas that’s saving prey species for these penguins — things like shrimp, anchovies and hake.” While this PA is newly defined in 2015, I believe the key factor for it’s ongoing success is protecting that area in which the penguins hunt for food, over the last decade penguins at Punta Tombo had to increase the distance travelled by 50 miles. Overfishing is one of the biggest threats to penguins.

Conversely, there is the Pingüino de Humboldt National Reserve. This is a protected area on the coast of Chile that is approximately 3 square miles in size (three!). This does not protect the area that the penguins hunt for food and because of this the competition with the fishing industry is one of their biggest threats (WAZA, n.d.;“Penguin (Humboldt) – Woodland Park Zoo Seattle WA,” n.d.). In addition to that pressure, they are also threatened by a nearby mining operation and the potential building of a nearby power plant.

Humboldt Penguins

The Woodland Park Zoo opened it’s state of the art Penguin exhibit in 2009 with just 20 Humboldt Penguins. They’ve been incredibly successful and last summer they hatched their 50th chick and sent many of them to other zoos around the country. This was all done under guidance of the Species Survival Plan (SSP). There are only about 12,000 Humboldt Penguins left in the wild and are classified as threatened, which is just shy of being considered endangered.

Penguins at Woodland Park Zoo

Notice the splotch of missing feathers on the penguin on the right? That penguin is shedding old feathers and growing in new ones, a process called molting.