The penguins in Dublin Zoo may look cute but they're feisty in defence, finds RONAN MCGREEVYon a Penguin Weekend visit
DUBLIN ZOO’S penguin keeper Garth de Jong spent the weekend giving talks to the public about the birds, but there was only one question that children wanted answered.
“Where’s Kelli?” piped up one child on Saturday afternoon as soon as de Jong asked for questions from the visitors who ringed the new penguin enclosure at the zoo.
Last month Kelli, a 10-year-old female Humboldt penguin, was snatched from the zoo in the early hours of the morning. How and why remains a mystery. She was later spotted wandering around Rutland Street in Dublin city centre and returned to her home.
All’s well that ends well because Kelli’s disappearance did wonders for the profile of the zoo’s penguin population (all 14 strong) and their new enclosure, along with spawning a lot of bad puns about thieves p-p-picking up a penguin.
Unfortunately, Kelli was nowhere to be found on Saturday as she was nesting behind a rock and also molting, the process whereby they shed their feathers and replace them with new ones. Molting turns their trademark black and white plumage to grey and makes them look like they were left out in the rain.
In such a state Kelli could not join the other penguins in their dive into the pool for fish. Neither would she emerge on demand as many visitors had hoped.
Dublin Zoo hosted the McVitie’s Penguin Weekend with a treasure hunt, keeper talks, face-painting and games. The purpose was to highlight the new enclosure, which is surrounded by glass, and its adjacent little playground along with the chocolate bars named after them, but, in truth, no marketing ploy could buy the publicity Kelli’s disappearance generated. The story was p-p-picked up by media all over the world.
Kelli’s disappearance is not the first drama to befall Dublin Zoo’s penguin population. In 1996, all but one of the colony died in mysterious circumstances which was initially thought to have been caused by toxic paint. The penguins were replaced two years later.
The present crop are looked after by South African-born de Jong (“not the one who kept kicking other players in the World Cup final”, he says) who has been working with penguins in zoos for more than 15 years, long enough to be disabused of any sentimentality about them.
Contrary to what most people believe, the Humboldt penguins are not from the Antarctic but from the Chile and Peru coasts where the more temperate climate is closer to our own. They are also much smaller than their better-known cousins, the Emperor penguins, but small does not mean cute.
The birds are inclined to follow him around and will peck at his legs until they receive their daily fish. “They may be cute looking, but not by nature,” he says. “They are fiercely aggressive when it comes to defending what is theirs. They have got a habit of rotating their neck when you walk up to the nest. I heard an American researcher say that they are trying to triangulate to peck your eyes out.
“It’s not just that they are aggressive towards humans, they are aggressive towards each other with a peck here and a peck there,” he says.
Dublin Zoo has had a very good recession. When the whole country seemed to be going into financial meltdown in 2008, it had a record year attracting 931,000 visitors.
Numbers dipped slightly below 900,000 last year, though it was still the second best year on record, and they are back up again this year.
The fine weather the weekend before last saw 20,000 visitors through the gates and there were healthy visitor numbers over the past two days although the weather was a lot more mixed.
The relatively good summer we have had and the horrendously bad economic situation has helped the zoo maintain its status as the country’s most popular visitor attraction after the Guinness Storehouse.
Dublin Zoo’s marketing executive, Suzanne O’Donovan, says: “It’s the whole staycation thing – some people are not going abroad and they want to do something with their weekends rather than stay at home.
“The tourist market is down, but we are getting a huge number of domestic visitors,”she says.
