[caption id="attachment_4393" align="alignnone" width="1350"] An adult Gentoo Penguin pauses to check the remains of a dead chick. Deception Island.[/caption]
Deception Island in the South Shetland group and a Gentoo Penguin stops when it sees a dead chick lying on the ground. What goes on in the mind of a penguin? Do they grieve? Was there a parent-offspring relationship between this adult and the chick? Probably not but, I’ll never know.
Raised on a television (and literary) diet of talking animals, there is a natural temptation to anthropomorphize when observing something like this. Never mind those people who have full-blown conversations with their pets!
As it happened, the adult spent about a minute looking at, and occasionally pecking at, the chick before walking on. I suspect this was curiosity rather than anything more.
For more penguin photos check out the Antarctica and Falkland Islands image galleries. ~KD.
Recently on social media:
Whilst today’s blog is drawn from my Antarctica trip earlier this year, I am currently on the road again and thought I’d share a recent story from Facebook:
Above, a photo I took when passing through Denpasar airport recently. I simply enjoyed the message.... surely people aren't that stupid! Well, yes they are!
Last night I was enjoying a glass of red on the 17th floor of my hotel in Jakarta when the floor started vibrating, then the whole building started swaying with large hanging light fittings swinging like pendulums. (I only had one glass!). An earthquake (initially reported as magnitude 7.4, later downgraded to 6.9) had occurred approx 300 kilometres away. An alarm was sounded and the order to evacuate the building was issued.
As I was walking down the 17 flights of stairs, I was struck by the number of people staring at the screens of their mobile devices as they descended the stairs. Have we now evolved to the point where we can do nothing before activating our social media accounts? We are now a species that cannot be distracted from our technology addictions even by an earthquake....
PS: It appears fortunately that no one was injured by the quake.
For anyone wishing to connect via social media, I can be found on MeWe.