Heart of the Nation: 1.5m penguins … on one island
The world’s entire royal penguin population live on Macquarie Island. Looking at this photo, you might be thinking, ‘Where’s Wally?’.
There are about 1.5 million royal penguins in the world and they all live on or around Macquarie Island, a 34km-long, pencil-shaped outcrop in the wild Southern Ocean, midway between Tasmania and Antarctica. Come spring, the royals assemble in vast breeding colonies, with each pair incubating their egg in a “scrape” – a shallow depression in the ground. Ma and Pa penguin share the task of incubation, which takes six weeks, and after the egg hatches he is left with chick-rearing duties while she heads off to hunt for fish and krill to feed the family. Looking at this photo of a breeding colony, you may be feeling admiration for the royals’ innate sense of gender equality, and their ability to spend these long, stressful weeks living cheek by jowl. You may be struck, too, by the mesmerising, painterly quality of photographer Doug Gimesy’s image. Then again, maybe you’re just chuckling to yourself and thinking, Where’s Wally?
Macquarie Island, which is administered by Tasmania, was awarded World Heritage status in 1997, and the federal government now plans to triple the size of the marine park around the island. But its natural riches were once a curse: decades of ruthless exploitation followed the island’s discovery by a sealing expedition out of Sydney in 1810. First, its fur seals were massacred for their skins. Then colonisers moved on to the elephant seals: their blubber yielded valuable oil, used to make soap and to fuel lamps. When the elephant seals began to run out, the island’s penguins – first the kings, then the royals – were fed into the giant boilers on the island’s processing plant. At the peak of the industry in 1905 the plant was processing 2000 penguins at a time, with each bird rendering about half a litre of oil.
Mercifully, Macquarie Island was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1933, and the only humans there now are scientists at the Australian Antarctic Division’s research station, plus occasional tourists. Gimesy, who braved a rough four-day voyage to get there, was lucky enough to see this royal penguin breeding colony, which he describes as “an incredible visual, auditory and olfactory experience”. His lasting impression of these 70cm-tall birds? “There were hundreds of thousands of them, and apart from a bit of squawking and nudging they all managed to get along,” he says. “I think we could all learn something from that.”