***Wear your masks. Keep social distances.***
This is a meet and greet. If you are new to Geocaching, Events are gatherings of geocachers. These events range from meet-and-greets to geocaching education seminars, to environmental cleanups. Anyone is welcome to attend Event Caches. They are great way to meet your fellow geocachers, learn about geocaching and get more involved in the Geocaching community...and sometimes help on a tough hide or puzzle!
April 25 is World Penguin Day. Penguins do not fly, they either waddle on their feet or slide on their bellies across the snow while using their feet to propel and steer themselves, a movement called "tobogganing", which conserves energy while moving quickly. They also jump with both feet together if they want to move more quickly or cross steep or rocky terrain.
Penguins (order Sphenisciformes /sfɪˈnɪsɪfɔːrmiːz/, family Spheniscidae /sfɪˈnɪsɪdiː/) are a group of aquatic flightless birds. They live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere, with only one species, the Galápagos penguin, found north of the Equator. Highly adapted for life in the water, penguins have countershaded dark and white plumage and flippers for swimming. Most penguins feed on krill, fish, squid and other forms of sea life which they catch while swimming underwater. They spend roughly half of their lives on land and the other half in the sea.
The largest living species is the emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri): on average, adults are about 3 ft 7 in tall and weigh 77 lb. The smallest penguin species is the little blue penguin (Eudyptula minor), also known as the fairy penguin, which stands around 13 in tall and weighs 2.2 lb. Among current penguins, larger penguins inhabit colder regions, while smaller penguins are generally found in temperate or even tropical climates. Some prehistoric species attained enormous sizes, becoming as tall or as heavy as an adult human. These were not restricted to Antarctic regions; on the contrary, subantarctic regions harboured high diversity, and at least one giant penguin occurred in a region of New Zealand, around 1250 miles south of the Equator 35 milllion years ago, in a climate decidedly warmer than today.
Adult male penguins are called cocks, females hens; a group of penguins on land is a waddle, and a similar group in the water is a raft.
They can drink salt water because their supraorbital gland filters excess salt from the bloodstream. The salt is excreted in a concentrated fluid from the nasal passages.
Penguins for the most part breed in large colonies, the exceptions being the yellow-eyed and Fiordland species; these colonies may range in size from as few as 100 pairs for gentoo penguins to several hundred thousand in the case of king, macaroni and chinstrap penguins. Living in colonies results in a high level of social interaction between birds, which has led to a large repertoire of visual as well as vocal displays in all penguin species. Agonistic displays are those intended to confront or drive off, or alternately appease and avoid conflict with, other individuals.
Penguins form monogamous pairs for a breeding season, though the rate the same pair recouples varies drastically. Most penguins lay two eggs in a clutch, although the two largest species, the emperor and the king penguins, lay only one. With the exception of the emperor penguin, where the male does it all, all penguins share the incubation duties. These incubation shifts can last days and even weeks as one member of the pair feeds at sea.
Penguins generally only lay one brood; the exception is the little penguin, which can raise two or three broods in a season.
Penguin eggs are smaller than any other bird species when compared proportionally to the weight of the parent birds; at 2 oz, the little penguin egg is 4.7% of its mothers' weight, and the lb) emperor penguin egg is 2.3%. The relatively thick shell forms between 10 and 16% of the weight of a penguin egg, presumably to reduce the effects of dehydration and to minimize the risk of breakage in an adverse nesting environment. The yolk, too, is large and comprises 22–31% of the egg. Some yolk often remains when a chick is born, and is thought to help sustain the chick if the parents are delayed in returning with food.
When emperor penguin mothers lose a chick, they sometimes attempt to "steal" another mother's chick, usually unsuccessfully as other females in the vicinity assist the defending mother in keeping her chick. In some species, such as emperor and king penguins, the chicks assemble in large groups called crèches. (from Wikipedia)