Penguin of the Day

Magellanic penguins are surprisingly loyal romantics — they mate with the same partner year after year, and the female can recognize her mate just by the sound of his voice.

Zavodovski Island is home to the largest penguin colony on the planet — somewhere between 600,000 and a million breeding pairs of chinstrap penguins, packed onto one volcanic island only about four kilometres across.

Penguins can stand on bare ice for hours without losing dangerous amounts of body heat, thanks to a network of blood vessels in their legs called a rete mirabile, which lets warm outgoing blood pre-heat the cold blood returning from a penguin's feet.

The Pebble and the Penguin follows Hubie, a shy, stuttering penguin who tries to win the heart of Marina, the most admired penguin in the rookery, by giving her a pebble in a nod to real Adelie penguin courtship rituals.

Penguins are the world's most successful flightless birds — they traded the sky entirely for a wing built for underwater swimming instead of aerial flight.

Tux, the cartoon penguin who serves as Linux's mascot, wasn't drawn by Linux's creator Linus Torvalds — a software engineer named Larry Ewing sketched him in 1996 using the GIMP image editor, winning a community contest to design the character.

The Pachydyptes, or New Zealand giant penguin, stood somewhere between 140 and 160 centimetres tall — roughly the height of an average adult human — and could weigh over 100 kilograms.

The northern rockhopper penguin is bigger than its rockhopper cousins, and scientists can also tell the three subspecies apart by the different species of lice living on them — each type of louse is picky enough to stick to just one kind of rockhopper.

Pingu almost never speaks a real language — nearly all dialogue is invented babbling and honking sounds called "Penguinese," making the show enjoyable worldwide without any translation needed.

Fiordland penguins sport a bold yellow crest that sweeps from the base of their beak all the way down the back of their neck — basically the most dramatic hairdo in the penguin world.

Standing 27 feet tall and weighing five tons, Cut Bank, Montana's famous penguin statue wears a red hat and perches on an iceberg that boldly declares the town the "Coldest Spot in the Nation.

Iceburgh, the Pittsburgh Penguins' costumed mascot, is modeled after a king penguin and gets his name from a pun combining "iceberg" with "Pittsburgh."

Long before the flightless black-and-white birds of Antarctica were called penguins, that name belonged to a different animal entirely — a large flightless North Atlantic seabird called the great auk.

Cape Crozier hosts one of the largest Adelie penguin colonies on Earth, with roughly 270,000 breeding pairs — plus one of only two colonies where emperor penguins breed this far south.

March of the Penguins took over a year to film, with just two cinematographers spending more than 13 months in Antarctica at temperatures between −50 and −60 °C, sometimes only able to work outside for three hours a day.

In 2008, the BBC convinced the world that Adélie penguins had evolved the ability to fly, releasing a trailer showing the birds soaring over icebergs and migrating to the rainforests of South America — all as an April Fools' Day prank.

The name "Penguins" was chosen from a fan contest that drew 26,000 entries — and only 700 people guessed the winner, inspired by the team's home arena being nicknamed "the Igloo.

In June 2011, an emperor penguin nicknamed Happy Feet washed up on a New Zealand beach after swimming roughly 3,200 kilometres from Antarctica — making him one of the northernmost emperor penguins ever recorded outside captivity.

The name Eudyptula, the penguin genus that includes the little penguin, comes from Ancient Greek words meaning "well" and "diver," plus a Latin diminutive suffix — so these tiny birds are essentially named "little good divers," which is both accurate and adorable.

Phillip Island, famous for its nightly little penguin parade, sits about 125 kilometres south-southeast of Melbourne and is connected to the mainland by a concrete bridge — but when it opened in November 1940, the islanders were so excited that a full public holiday was declared to celebrate.

In the 2011 anime Penguindrum, a magical spirit living inside a penguin-shaped hat saves a dying girl named Himari — but only if her brothers can track down a mysterious object called the Penguindrum.

Volunteer Point, home to the Falklands' largest king penguin colony, got its name from a ship called the *Volunteer*, which dropped by the Falkland Islands in 1815 — proving that if you show up somewhere once, they might just name a headland after you.

Penguins have a special gland just above their eyes that filters salt out of their blood — it's so efficient that the salty byproduct contains about five times the salt concentration of their normal body fluids.

Waimanu is one of the oldest known penguins, waddling around Earth roughly 60–62 million years ago — just after the same extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs.

Royal penguins are found on just one tiny island on Earth — Macquarie Island in the Southern Ocean — making them one of the most geographically exclusive birds on the planet.

Pablo, the blue penguin of The Backyardigans, is the high-strung member of the group — he's prone to full-blown panic attacks whenever an imaginary adventure throws an obstacle his way.

Rockhopper penguins can't slide on their bellies like most penguins because they live on harsh, rocky terrain — so instead they hop everywhere, which is exactly how they got their name.

Kumimanu means "monster bird" in Māori, which turns out to be a pretty fair description — this ancient New Zealand penguin stood around 177 cm tall and weighed roughly 101 kg, about the size of a large adult human.

Tux exists because of a penguin bite — Linux creator Linus Torvalds was nibbled by a little penguin at the National Zoo & Aquarium in Canberra, Australia in 1993, and he claimed to have contracted "penguinitis" ever after.

Banded penguins are sometimes called "jackass penguins" — not as an insult, but because their loud locator calls sound remarkably like a donkey braying.

The eastern rockhopper penguin sports a wild yellow spiky hairdo on each side of its head — and if that weren't enough flair, it also has distinctive pink lips around its orange-brown bill.

The penguin at the heart of the story is named Captain Cook — after the famous explorer James Cook — by Mr. Popper, a house painter whose biggest dream is to visit faraway places he's only ever read about.

The little penguin is the smallest penguin species in the world, standing just 30–33 cm tall and weighing about 1.5 kg — roughly the same as a bag of sugar.

One of the rarest penguins, with pale yellow eyes and a band of yellow across the head; it nests alone in forest rather than in colonies.