From oil lamps to shower curtain

19 November 1994

PENGUINS appear with an alarmingly increasing frequency on everything from
Christmas cards to shower curtains. Young jugglers can learn their trade with
a set of stuffed cloth penguins; cooks can chop their onions on a penguin-
shaped board. The Penguin waddled and cursed his way through Batman’s
adventures. So why do these birds have such a grip on our imaginations? Why do
we warm towards what we once saw as a handy refill for an oil lamp? In Penguin
(Whittet Books, pp 128, £7.99 pbk), John Love explores the history of
human encounters with penguins from Vasco da Gama’s first bloody meeting in
1497 – “we killed as many as we chose” – to today’s studies of behaviour and
efforts at conservation. He discusses the survival strategies of 16 species,
marvelling at their toughness and wildly varying behaviour from burrow-
dwelling Magellanic penguins to the stalwart emperor penguin settling in for a
long winter of starvation hundreds of kilometres from the nearest food.