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King Penguin | Aptenodytes patagonicus
Koningspinguïn | Pingüino rey
After the Emperor, the King Penguin is the largest penguin in the world: close to a metre tall, silver-grey on the back, satin white on the belly, with two bright orange spoon-shaped patches on either side of the neck and a long, slightly decurved bill with an orange stripe. It dives routinely to hundreds of metres and breeds in colonies that lie on the beach like a dark carpet.
Voice
At the colony comes a musical, many-noted bugling that a pair performs in duet with heads raised and that carries the length of the beach. At sea there are only short contact notes; ashore birds also give a soft cooing. Chicks call their parents with an individually distinctive three-note whistle, by which a returning adult finds its own chick among thousands.
No freely licensed recording has been found for this species yet; what to listen for is described below.
Identification
A very large, upright penguin of nearly a metre, with a silver-grey back, black head and throat, satin white belly and on each side of the neck a bright orange patch running down like a spoon and fading to yellow on the breast. The bill is long, slender and slightly decurved, black with an orange to pink stripe along the lower mandible. Young birds have pale yellow rather than orange neck patches. Chicks are at first nearly naked and black, later clothed in thick brown down — early explorers took them for a separate 'woolly penguin'.
Confusion species
Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) is the only true confusion species and does not occur here: it is larger and heavier still, has a shorter bill and carries the yellow neck patch lower and without orange on the upper breast. On Macquarie Island it stands among Gentoo Penguins (Pygoscelis papua), smaller with a white crown band and orange-red bill, and Royal Penguins (Eudyptes schlegeli), barely half the weight and carrying orange-yellow crests. A stray King Penguin on an Australian or New Zealand beach is fixed at once by the orange ear patch and by sheer size.
Habitat
Subantarctic sea, where it forages far from the colony on lanternfish and squid and dives repeatedly to a hundred or three hundred metres, exceptionally beyond three hundred. Colonies lie on flat open beaches and moraine terraces just behind the tideline, where no nest is built: the egg rests on the feet under a brood pouch, so the bird spends its whole incubation standing and can walk while carrying it.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by main group and formation.
Range and movements
Within this map window it breeds only on Macquarie Island, where the colony at Lusitania Bay holds over seventy thousand pairs; beyond it the colonies lie on South Georgia, the Falklands, Marion, Prince Edward, Crozet, Kerguelen and Heard. In New Zealand it counts as a vagrant: regular on Campbell Island, rare on the Auckland, Snares and Antipodes Islands, with scattered mainland records including Stewart Island, Invercargill and even Auckland Harbour. Single birds also turn up now and then on Tasmanian and southern Australian beaches.
- Breeding (summer)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
The certain address in this area is an expedition voyage to Macquarie Island, where the Lusitania Bay colony shows from the sea as a brown-black field. Anyone finding a large penguin on a beach in New Zealand or Tasmania should look first at the neck patch: bright orange and spoon-shaped makes it this species, pale yellow an immature. Leave such a bird alone — it is almost always moulting and cannot enter the water.
Conservation
Least Concern (LC), with some two and a quarter million breeding pairs worldwide and an overall increasing trend; on Macquarie Island the species recovered from the nineteenth-century oiling works and is again numerous. The large reservation is the warming of the southern ocean: the foraging zone along the polar front is shifting away from the colonies, and even a small rise in sea temperature measurably depresses adult survival. On Ile aux Cochons in the Indian Ocean a colony of half a million pairs collapsed within a few decades.
Scientific name
Aptenodytes patagonicus | Miller, 1778
The English illustrator John Frederick Miller described the species in 1778 as Aptenodytes patagonicus, and in the same work introduced the genus Aptenodytes, so author and year carry no parentheses. The genus name is formed from Greek a-, 'without', ptenos, 'winged', and dutes, 'diver': the wingless diver. patagonicus means 'of Patagonia' and rests on where the first birds were seen, not on a breeding ground — the species breeds nowhere in Patagonia. The type material came from South Georgia. The Maori name tokoraki exists alongside.