The King Penguins of Useless Bay

In 2010, on the shores of Bahía Inútil (Useless Bay!) on the Straits of Magellan in Tierra del Fuego, king penguins established a new colony, now numbering about 60 birds. (For comparison, many of the more established colonies, all on tiny islands, have 100,000 birds!)

This map shows all known King Penguin colonies, in red, and this new one, in yellow

It is a very unusual breeding colony because unlike most other colonies, whose residents travel long distances from tiny islands to forage, these birds forage only locally in the Magellan Strait. This second map shows where these penguins forage; the yellow star is their colony. It is the only colony in the world reachable by car.

The convenience of this local food shopping should help them feed their chicks more efficiently, but the chick mortality rate is quite high, perhaps due to either predators like gray foxes, or diseases like bird flu?

Here is the new community. The Straits are behind them, and they are sheltered by the intervening dunes:

An adult is up to 1m (39″) high, and weighs up to 18Kg (40lbs). That’s about 75% of the size of an emperor penguin. Look at the interacting pairs, stretching themselves tall.

They are most probably courting, since it is breeding season.

They are serially monogamous, keeping the same mate all year, but not necessarily the next. These two seem to have bonded:

Some are undecided:

He seems to have rejected both of them:

Some are apparently fending off competitors:

And some may sadly be destined for a solitary life:

But for those who succeed, one year later you become the proud parents of a teenager:

This is last year’s chick, and it will soon shed its down and head out to sea. Meanwhile, only its mother could love it.

PS: All maps are from argos.com, the high tech company that helped tag and track the penguins for a study by Pütz et al 2021.

A new king penguin colony in Magellan Strait?