Two thousand kilometers from the southern tip of South America sits the island of South Georgia, a Yosemite-sized piece of polar tundra boasting thriving communities of king penguins, elephant seals, and fur seals. Alongside this charismatic fauna, native birds like the South Georgia pintail duck and Antarctica’s only songbird, the South Georgia pipit, coexist. And here, in 2021, Belgian nature photographer Yves Adams caught a striking yellow-gold penguin on camera.
Where normal penguins had black feathers, this one had neon yellow. The effect was probably caused by leucism, a genetic mutation that results in depigmentation. Because the penguin was never studied closely, though, it could also have been albino.
This yellow penguin appeared in 2021 on South Georgia. Photo: Yves Adams
Mission yellow penguin
Yves Adams returned to South Georgia this year as an expedition guide, hoping to find his golden penguin once more. It was nowhere to be found.
But his expedition leader tipped him off to something even more extraordinary, Adams told IFLScience. Adams kept his eyes open, and his patience was eventually rewarded. In a flock of its peers stood a jet-black king penguin.
Besides the video above, Adams snapped a set of glamor shots of the penguin: standing solo, frolicking in the snow, and inspecting the ground with neck-elongating intensity.
Adam’s black penguin is striking, but beyond that, it’s also amazingly rare. In 2019, a National Geographic photographer snapped a shot of another black king penguin, this one with splashes of white on his wing. Partial melanism, when animals are mostly but not entirely black, is more common than complete melanism. Even for the 2019 penguin, an ornithologist made the journalist who contacted him swear an oath that the black penguin was real.
But Adams’ new penguin isn’t mostly black — it’s entirely black.
#blackoutpenguin
Up close, Adams said, the penguin’s belly feathers have a greenish tint. He seemed healthy and fit in with the rest of the flock.
On Instagram, he wrote, “This one is for the penguin addicts!” In case the penguin addicts needed some help from the algorithm, he tagged the photos #gothicpenguin, #formalpenguin, and #blackoutpenguin.
The prize for his best hashtag, though, stays with his original golden penguin: #yellowpenguinlove. Well, just look at it — it’s yellow, and hard not to love.
The yellow penguin goes for a swim. Photo: Yves Adams
