penguins

It appears that not only cats kill cute  little birds…and Gareth Morgan isn’t the only one to kill penguins:

A little blue penguin has died after being  picked up and handled by members of the public.

Department of Conservation Motueka  biodiversity manager Bruce Vander Lee said DOC received reports on Tuesday of a penguin  being  seen under a bush at Little Kaiteriteri near a pipe which he thought it may have been using as a burrow.

‘‘At that point someone decided it needed help and moved it.’’

DOC Motuka  then received a chain of phone calls about the penguin being handled.  Read more »

Now that Gareth Morgan has upset every animal lover, including every middle aged woman in New Zealand, can we expect some serious capital outflows from his underperforming KiwiSaver fund that bears his name? Why would people want to invest their money with someone who wants to kill all the cats?

And Kiwibank won’t be pleased with the bang up job Gareth is doing on the Kiwisaver fund they bought off Gareth a year ago?

I wonder if there are any clawback provisions for the purchase price since Gareth is now destroying their Kiwisaver brand?

Or has crafty Gareth chosen to open his mouth a full one year after the purchase date, perhaps conveniently outside any clawback date?

The TAB won’t be taking bets on how quickly Kiwibank will rebrand the Mad Moustache Fund into something a little less controversial.

Mad Morgan certainly knows no bounds when doing nutty things. In the last year or so he’s:

ᔥ The Sun

It seems that penguins are depraved pervs when it comes to sex:

THE “depraved” sexual exploits of penguins have been revealed in a controversial report deemed too shocking for publication.

Dr George Murray Levick detailed the birds’ smutty shenanigans during Captain Scott’s ill-fated 1910-13 Antarctic Expedition.

He was stunned to see a young male engaged in necrophilia when it attempted to mate with a DEAD female.

Sexual abuse of young chicks was also observed as were acts of avian homosexuality.

The Edwardian Englishman was so horrified by his own findings that he initially recorded them in Greek to make them inaccessible to the average reader.

Mr Levick described how male penguins would gather in “hooligan bands of half a dozen or more and hang about the outskirts of the knolls, whose inhabitants they annoy by their constant acts of depravity”.

London’s Natural History Museum has now unearthed the landmark study entitled Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguin, which had been lost for decades.

ᔥ The Telegraph

This is going to bend a few people out of shape…oh well no matter. I expect we will get some along who will insist that the gay can be prayed away:

Every spring for six years Gentoo penguins Inca and Rayas have lovingly built a nest together, only to find that no eggs arrive to fill it. It doesn’t seem to have dawned on the couple that both of them are male.

But after the repeated heartbreak of watching other penguins become parents and raise their young, the “gay” couple finally have something to celebrate after their keepers gave them an egg of their own to care for.

Rather than questioning how the improbable scenario arose, the inseparable pair has seized their one chance at fatherhood with the zeal of a couple who know they may not get another.

Inca has taken on the “female” role of incubating the donated egg, obtained by keepers a month ago, and stoically remains atop his prize for most of the day, refusing the temptation to dip his feathers into the water.

His partner Rayas, meanwhile, keeps a watchful guard over the nest while eating whatever he can fit in his beak in preparation for the traditional male job of feeding his young with regurgitated fish.

His keepers report that Rayas has become more anxious due to nervous anticipation of his due date in June, but that the job seems to have made him into a “new penguin”, according to The Times.

ᔥ NZ Herald

I thought Climate Change was meant to be killing things like Polar Bears, seals and penguins…turns out as usual that the warmists have been all too alarmist. Shame about Happy Feet, and Orca got him.

The first census of penguins at the South Pole has found nearly 600,000 – twice the number thought to be there.

Using state-of-the-art satellite imagery, scientists found 44 colonies of emperor penguins.
Seven colonies were previously unknown, and many of the known ones were bigger than expected.

In the past, it was notoriously difficult to estimate their numbers as they live in temperatures of -50c, and some colonies are in the most remote parts of the Antarctic sea ice.

The British Antarctic Survey hopes that having an accurate number – thought to be 595,000 compared with previous estimates of 270,000-350,000 – will help manage conservation and track climate change.

There are plenty of terrible stories about how global warming is killing all and then there are the various canaries in the mine stories…except they are wrong:

James Woodford in The Sydney Morning Herald, January 13, 1996:

A TRAGEDY is beginning to unfold for the creatures of the zoologically rich Macquarie Island, with climate change in the Southern Ocean occurring at the fastest rate on earth. Scientists now fear that a 94 per cent crash in the population of rock hopper penguins on New Zealand’s Campbell Island is about to occur at Macquarie. Macquarie’s population of rock hoppers, which has fallen from 6000 pairs in the 1970s to 3000 pairs now, is estimated to have declined by a further 5 per cent this season. The increase in ocean temperatures may have forced the krill into colder waters and, because the birds are so small, they are unable to reach it, said Ms Cindy Hull, a zoologist at the University of Tasmania. She is now concerned that the collapse in rock hopper numbers may be a warning that numbers of the island’s three other penguin species may soon also be affected by climate change.

Tasmania Parks & Wildlife website yesterday:

Macquarie Island is recognised for its rich and diverse animal life. Around 3.5 million seabirds arrive on Macquarie Island each year to breed and moult. Most of these are penguins. No accurate counts of rockhopper penguins are known; estimates range from 10,000 to 500,000 breeding pairs.

and from a pdf paper about the pest eradication project:

King penguins (Aptenodytes patagonica) and Rockhopper penguins (Eudyptes chrysocome) are the next most common penguin species with 200 000 – 400 000 breeding pairs and >32 000 pairs respectively

via the tipline

There are many theories about what happened to Happy Feet…I think I now know…he was kidnapped!

From the band When Pets Attack.

Happy Feet is no more.

The only question remaining is what had Happy Feet for lunch.My pick is a seal.

Makes you wonder why we spent thousands of dollars fattening up seal food.

from Hansard:

Catherine Delahunty: Will he consider adopting the Green Party’s Equal Pay Amendment Bill, which requires employers to report on gender pay rates in their workplaces and release aggregated information on gender pay to employees on request; if not, why not?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: As the bill has not been drawn from the ballot, we have not yet had an opportunity to consider it as a caucus. But I say to the member that there is probably more chance of Happy Feet having a holiday in Honolulu than there is of her bill ever being drawn, because the Labour Party is filibustering its entire parliamentary time to stop the Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill.

Looks like David Farrar is off to Hawaii with John Key for a holiday.

Looks like Alasdair Thompson is safe for now, but I’m not so sure about David Farrar’s columns….looks like the Herald is polling for an answer.

I wonder if Bomber’s campaign of hate is having an effect?