Breakfast with Penguins

 Stardate 65751.6

12:30 - I am here to tell you that dreams can come true.  My whole life I have wanted a close encounter with the penguin kind, and on April 14^th, I got it. The Maryland Zoo hosted a penguin event called "Breakfast with Penguins". So I bought myself a ticket two months in advance and waited for the moment when I would get to meet the penguins.

The Maryland Zoo is located outside of Baltimore and is home to a colony of Black-Footed penguins. They are also known as African Penguins. In the wild, these awesome birds live on the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. Feeding on small sardines and anchovies, Black-footed penguins swim in the ocean at 12 mph, darting away from sharks, Cape Fur Seals, and sometimes Killer Whales! Fun Fact, Focus Foxies - African penguins’ coloring protects them from predators. Their reverse colorings make their white bellies look like the sky, when predators are swimming below. Their black backs look like the sea from above. Clever birds, I tell you! To sustain their cute physiques, African penguins must eat a pound of food a day (or roughly one-eighth of their body weight). African penguins participate in the penguin tradition of monogamy. Both females and males take turns incubating the eggs. Females lay two eggs per clutch, meaning two baby penguins at a time.

 

An unfortunate reality is that the Black-footed penguins are an endangered species. The Maryland Zoo remains on the forefront in combating Black-Footed penguins’ population decline. With the largest colony in North America, the Maryland Zoo has one of the most successful breeding programs. The zoo matches each pair of penguins up and gives them a nesting room inside the large rock island. Within the colony, you can see penguins at different stages of life, but the little chicks are not on display. They reside inside learning to eat from their caretakers and not worrying about a thing. The offspring from the Maryland Zoo’s colony can be found in aquariums around the United States.

 

Our breakfast consisted of a warm meal, a meet and greet with "Ambassador" penguins, and a penguin feeding session. We ate our breakfast and listened to an interesting talk about the Penguin Programs. Fun Fact number 2, Focus Foxies - the African penguins are also called Jackass penguins. They get this name from the noise they make, not their attitudes. They make braying noises like a donkey! After the talk, we were in the first group to meet the Ambassador penguins. These penguins are a separate colony because they do not breed and are considered really nice penguins for human interactions. Focus Foxies, to save you the embarrassment of asking what diplomatic duties these Ambassador penguins have to perform, they have no diplomatic duties in conjunction with an embassy. They specialize in zoo education and photo ops, which judging by our pictures they do quite well. The last part of our adventure involved feeding the penguins, but by the time we got over there, the penguins were mostly full. They were cute to watch swim around.

I waited 24 years to see penguins closely, and they did not disappoint. It is a good thing we were not allowed to touch them because I would have taken one or three and never looked back!

Focus Foxies in attendance: Rob. Thanks to him we got to the zoo, despite me being a nervous wreck.