By Julie

The third Antarctic bird braving the cold down at the bottom of the world is another regal penguin: the King. King penguins are unique, skilled, and even wacky! King penguins don’t exactly live in Antarctic. They’re sub-Antarctic, they live around North Antarctica. They’re not the most abundant species of penguin, but they live in humungous colonies of up to 20,000 birds! Kings are a lot like Emperor penguins- they even look almost identical to them, but kings are just a bit smaller and more brightly colored. They have pupils the size of pinheads in the light, but they grow tremendous in the dark. This lets them catch up to 2,000 fish in the dim waters of the sea! It does sort of help that some fish glow in the dark, though. The king penguin babies are a little strange- they don’t look like their parents or even penguins at all! They are almost as large as their penguin parents, plump, fuzzy with no sleek feathers, and brown all over! They look so different that people used to think that they were another species, dubbing them “woolly penguins”! The king penguins eat squid and fish, but the dads can go for a month without food while their mates are at sea! But the babies are even tougher, able to fast for five months at once and lose 68% of their body weight! Parents are able to pick out the voice of their child from hundreds of chicks in a penguin créche, or huddle. When the chicks are in their eggs, adults keep them in their warm brood patches on their feet, the only penguins to not have nests. Parents take turns balancing the egg. Another interesting fact is that most penguins use a little hop to move around, but kings prefer running with their feet. To be able to observe these creatures at work and play would be more amazing than a trip to Hawaii for me.
NOTE: This nonfiction paragraph was part of a school project.