Emperor Penguin Spotted On Western Australian Shores For The First Time

On November 1, 2024, Aron Fowler and his friends were at Ocean Beach, just south of Denmark in Western Australia, when they saw an emperor penguin walking toward them. This aquatic flightless bird had swum over 2,000 miles (3,218 km) from its usual habitat in the icy waters off the Antarctic coast. It was the first recorded sighting of an emperor penguin in Australia.

"It stood up in the waves and just waddled straight up to us, an emperor penguin. He was probably about a meter high, and he was not shy at all," Fowler told ABC. "He tried to do, like, a slide on his belly, thinking it was snow, I guess, and just face-planted in the sand and stood up and shook all the sand off."

Fowler alerted local wildlife authorities, who quickly arrived to rescue the lost bird. The male penguin, nicknamed Gus, was severely malnourished. He weighed just 51 pounds (23 kg) — about half the weight of a healthy emperor penguin in the wild. Experts estimate that Gus is about a year old.

The young bird is now under the care of Carol Biddulph, a local seabird expert. To help him cope with Australia’s warmer climate, Biddulph regularly mists him with freezing water. While she is working hard to rehabilitate Gus, experts are unsure when he will be ready to return to the wild.

Dr. Belinda Cannell, an ecologist at the University of Western Australia, who is helping with Gus's rehabilitation, has never seen an emperor penguin this far north.

"The tracked ones have never reached this far," she said. "The furthest north they go from Antarctica is about 50 degrees south [latitude] from my readings, and Ocean Beach is 35 degrees south, so a lot further north than what they've ever tracked emperor penguins from Antarctica before."

The expert is also uncertain why the penguin swam over 2,000 miles. She speculates he may have followed an ocean current.

"What they tend to do is follow certain currents where they're going to find lots of different types of food. So maybe those currents have just tended to be a little bit further north towards Australia than they normally would," she said.

Regardless of the reason for his epic swim, Biddulph is thrilled that Gus is here.

"Never in my wildest thoughts would I have thought I'd ever have an emperor penguin to care for," she said. "It's just such a privilege to be part of this bird's journey."

Emperor penguins are the tallest and heaviest of all living penguin species. They are usually found on the sea ice surrounding Antarctica's coast. Scientists estimate that there are about 595,000 adult emperor penguins left in the wild. However, exact numbers have been hard to confirm. The 66 known colonies are scattered in remote, hard to reach areas. In 2022, these penguins were added to the Endangered Species list due to threats from sea-ice loss driven by climate change.

Resources: CNN.com, guardian.com, Nationalgeographic.com