Rambles with penguins

As noted at the time, while I was in London I bought The Penguin Book of Penguins: partly because I was in holiday mood and wanted to buy something, but also because it was such a very neat idea, and such an elegant design (it shouldn't really be orange, of course, which indicates fiction, but let's not be pedantic). And penguins are a regular feature of the Elm Tree Quiz, so really, it was my duty to buy the book...

Author Peter Fretwell is a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey: he has made a specialty of using satellite images to learn about emperor penguin colonies (there's a bit about this is the book; I'd have liked more). ( I should probably include a trigger warning here: )

Despite all of which...

One of the book's virtues is that it is illustrated with drawings by the author's wife, Lisa Fretwell. I did not feel that she was in any way the lesser contributor: (this author interview with both of them includes her drawing of an Adélie penguin).

Its other great virtue is that it is full of irresistible Penguin Facts. The zoological details are amazing, but inevitably it was the historical / cultural stuff that really set me thinking. Take those Adélie penguins, for example. Peter Fretwell says that the species was named after his wife by Jules Dumont d'Urville, who first discovered this penguin in 1840. Two things bothered me about this statement.

The first was the idea of Dumont d'Urville telling his wife Darling, I discovered these funny little black-and-white flightless birds, and they have such a comical waddle, I called them after you... It turns out that Fretwell is simplifying things, and this is not quite what happened: other sources seem to agree that Dumont d'Urville named Adélie Land (Terre Adélie) in Antarctica for his wife, and someone else named the penguins for the area where they were found.

The other was that as early as 1840, penguins were being differentiated into new species. This is probably just ignorance on my part: I begin to suspect that as new and very scattered colonies of penguins were encountered, it was a natural to assume that each was a different species as to assume that it wasn't. The internet doesn't seem particularly interested in this subject, though there is a talk by historian Ellen Arnold which I need to listen to; also what zeems (as far as I understand it) to be a genome analysis investigating the hstory of the devekopment of the different penguin species. But I was starting from the point at which early explorers identified these birds as "penguins" (Fretwell dates it to 1577, in the log of the Golden Hind, which is so hood I would love it to be true). ( When is a penguin not a penguin? )

( splitters and [c]lumpers )

I have loaned my copy of the book to the Quizmaster. He asks: "But is there a Puffin Book of Puffins?" This is such a good question; why didn't it occur to me?