NATURE COLUMN: Bill Cawley
I HAVE picked up a penguin. I am not going stir crazy. I realise that the penguins natural habitats are distant southern seas, but the penguins I am referring to are those who live in the Staffordshire Moorlands at the Peak Wildlife Park at Winkhill.
My family decided to adopt two Humboldt Penguins- Doris and Reg. The wildlife centre is closed and is looking at ways to raise funding imaginatively hence adopting a penguin (or lemur). The badges scroll and fluffy toys arrived a few days after we had coughed up.
There is conflicting stories on why the penguin is so named. I favour the explanation that it is derived from two Welsh words, pen and gwyn, which mean ‘head and white.’
It is likely that ‘penguin’ was at one time the Welsh name of the Great Auk as it had a white patch near its bill.
The word ‘penguin’ was first reliably reported in a letter in 1578 from Newfoundland to describe the flightless (and now extinct) Great Auk and also recorded in the voyages of Richard Hakluyt, a contemporary of Drake.
The name was mistakenly transferred later to the Antarctic bird by Welsh sailors as they explored the southern ocean.
The Humboldt part of the species is an equally interesting aspect of the story as they were named by the extraordinary early 19th century polymath and naturalist the German Alexander von Humboldt (1769- 1859).
His name lives on in various forms, not only in having a penguin named after him but also a squid, an orchid, two species of snail, a variety of oak and willow tree, beetle and skunk as well as other species.
There is a glacier, mountain ranges in New Zealand and Antarctica, lakes in the United States and perhaps most famously the current that flows northward along the west side of South America. Humboldt had the world altitude record for some years having climbed Chimborazo in the Andes just short of 20,000 feet in 1802 without mountaineering equipment.
Darwin who was a disciple met the garrulous scientist at the end of his life in London and could not get a word in edgeways.
Humboldt also predicted climate change. He was the first to explain the importance of trees to the eco system.
Humboldt was gay and my last comments concern another type of Penguin.
In 2005 a children’s book ‘And Tango Makes Three’ was published based on the lives of two male Chinstrap Penguins who bonded and raised a chick in a New York zoo.
The book was popular with teachers who approved of gay rights and was equally detested by evangelical Christians.
It became the most banned book in American libraries in that year. However there is a twist to the story as one of penguins turned out to be bisexual and left his long time partner to mate with a female.