How Come We Always Have Silverfish For Dinner!?

The town of Oamaru has a colony of Blue Penguins. These are small, only about a foot tall when fully grown. At this time of year the penguin chicks are as big as their parents, but still dependent on them for food. The parents spend the day fishing, and return at dusk to the nesting area so that they can feed their young with the day’s catch.

Evening had turned to dusk, and dusk was fading into the darkness of a cloudy night..

He advanced slowly up the slope from the shoreline. He stopped every three or four steps. Motionless, he listened for the sound of potential predators. Behind him in single file were half-a-dozen other birds. As he crested the slope, a chorus of calls broke out from the nesting area where their ravenously hungry chicks were waiting.

Now he was torn between caution and eagerness. The other penguins bunched up around him, assessing the twenty feet of open ground they had to cross before they could reach the cover of long grass where their chicks were waiting. Then parental instinct took over and they threw caution to the winds as they surged across the gap.

Off to one side two chicks had been patrolling the verge of the grass. Now they broke forward to sate their hunger. But the penguin they latched on to was having none of it – he was not their parent! He turned and ran away, not wanting to squander the food he had gathered for his own chick. The two strangers gave chase but he escaped when they stumbled and fell, their juvenile clumsiness overcoming their greed.

Out of the dark a blur of brown resolved itself into a rabbit. He darted across the grass, oblivious to all the avian activity.

Around him parents searched out their young, drawn by their calls – short wails alternating with a high-pitched trilling sound. As each chick found a parent it fed voraciously on regurgitated fish.

Two hundred humans watched in complete, unbroken, awed silence. For 35 million years the penguins had been acting out this little family ritual unobserved. Now, after all this time, they had an audience. And thankfully, they did not know it.