All Black Penguins?

Two years ago on the Antarctic Peninsula we stopped off at a Chilean science base on a wet, muddy afternoon. We stopped purposely searching for an all-white penguin we’d heard about from scientists on King George Island. It took a couple hours, but we found it. Devoid of pigmentation, something like an albino, the penguin was rare though the soldiers stationed at the base for the summer months told us there were three of them scattered around the island. Now comes a report, by National Geographic reporter Andrew Evans, of an all-black penguin. He spotted and photographed the even more unusual King penguin at Fortuna Bay on the subantarctic island of South Georgia. When Nat Geo reached out to Toronto-based ornithologist Dr. Allan Baker for an explanation of the big bird, his professorial response was something along the lines of “Wow. That’s so bizarre I can’t even believe it. Wow.”

South Georgia All-Black

The all-white bird we spied at the Gonzalez-Videla base was leucistic, meaning without pigment. Where most penguins are black, it was all white. The bird photographed on South Georgia was apparently suffering from an overdose of melanin, turning its feathers all-black, extremely rare in penguins. (Thanks to a pair of friends – Naked Jim and Hollis B. – for the sighting!)

Antartic Peninsula All-White

Romancing Zanzibar