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My favourite birds are surely penguins and I hope to have the chance, in my life, to see them in their natural environment, of course, never in a zoo or aquarium. I love them for their amusing and tender appearance, when they walk on the ground in their typical clumsy way, or when they sit on their only big egg and care their always hungry chick. After this "declaration of love" of mine for penguins, I quit with my personal feelings to start giving some information about these birds.

- Physical features.

They belong to the order of the "Sfenishiform" birds and they are all highly aquatic birds, unable to fly because their wings are totally transformed in fins.

Their rear legs are short, to act as rear fins and direct their body while swimming and their whole body is highly hydrodynamic, similar to that of fish and cetaceans, for what is called "evolution convergence" to the best adaptation to marine environment.

Their plumes are very dense against the cold, short, narrow and adherent to their body. They can have two main colours: black or grey on the back and white on the whole belly, until the throat. These plumes have another adaptation to the long periods swimming in the ocean: the oil secreted by some glands that penguins spread sometimes on their plumes with their beak, to keep them impermeable. Then, under their skin, penguins have a thick layer of fat that makes rounded their body shape and, above all, insulates them from the cold of the southern oceans.

Penguins are rather clumsy on the ground, but really the opposite, fast and agile, in the water. Moreover, when they move on the flat surfaces of ice along the Antarctic coasts, they like better not to walk, but to slide on their fat belly. In this way, they move faster on the ice and save more energies than walking.

- Where they live.

Penguins live along the coasts of the Antarctica, of Patagonia, Falkland Islands, South Africa (near Cape-town, New Zealand and (this is not a joke!) even in the Galapagos Islands, along the equator, with the Galapagos penguin.
This, for the presence of cold sea currents, rich of food. So, penguins can live in temperate and even tropical climates although nearly always in the southern hemisphere.

- Food.

Regarding food, penguins eat only the little fish, squids and plankton they capture in the ocean, up to many hundreds of Km from the coasts where they live.

- Their community life.

Penguins live in very numerous and crowded communities, up to many tens of thousands of individuals.

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