The Penguin Lessons

by Tom Michell

The populations of penguin colonies have suffered serious decline in the last forty years, some by as much as 80 percent and more.

Magellan penguins, Spheniscus magellanicus, can be found all round the southern parts of South America. They grow to between eighteen inches and two feet high and weigh between seven and fourteen pounds,

Penguins have enormous and extremely strong feet, which are equipped with very sharp talons, not unlike those of an eagle, and can shred human skin. Interestingly, the undersides of penguins’ feet are not a bit birdlike but are more like a monkey’s: fleshy, muscular, and dexterous.

Penguins are hunters and can look straight ahead with binocular vision, but they have the avian habit of looking first with one eye and then with the other.

I needed a penguin like a penguin needs a motorbike.

July 9 Avenue, the widest city road in the world.

Relatively few of the shops were open. Those that were had prices that were changing continuously. In general, shops were closed unless the owner needed some cash or knew he could replace his stock.

Assistants even changed the prices of items placed in shopping baskets, sometimes right at the till, when the cashier would look at the marked price and say, “It costs twice that today!”

“There’s a penguin out there!” “Oh, I expect it has just flown in for a rest as it migrates south for the winter,” I said. Cognitive contradiction was a teaching style I liked—saying untrue things that forced students to challenge the ideas they were presented with.

Responsibility can so often bring out the best in students, and there was no shortage of willing helpers just ready to let the best be brought out of them by tending to the needs of Juan Salvado.

“You can’t release penguins on their own,” the keeper explained. “Like sea lions, come to that, they simply won’t go without a fellow creature of their own kind; they won’t leave.”