I Had No Clue What I Was Seeing In This First Picture. Then I Zoomed In And...OMG.
From a distance it's quite hard to know what you're seeing here, but as you look closer and closer you'll see just how amazing mother nature can be.#1 That's odd. Looks like some sort of a wave?
#2 Or are those groups of people at a music festival?
#3 Oh right, penguins!
#4 King Penguins to be exact, thousands upon thousands of them.
#5 The brown wave formations are brown baby King Penguins, that the adults have herded together into groups.
#6 They do this to create a kind of a day care facility for their chicks.
#7 So that most of the adults can go about their penguin day of mostly catching fish.
#8 While select other penguins take the duty of guarding these creches of chicks.
#9 The penguins do this so the chicks can retain their body warmth better in a tighter and more controllable group, as well as allowing the adults to protect them from predators.
#10 "Hey, check out my fur coat!"
#11 Here's a better aerial view of these incredible wave-like patterns of brown baby penguins herded into their creches.
The chicks take between 10 to 13 months to raise, and seeing how they cannot regulate their body temperature very well the parents have to care for them round the clock for the first three weeks. After that initial period they put the chicks into one of these "day care" creches, returning only every two or three days with food for their young.
All these pictures were taken at the shoreline of the southern Atlantic Ocean island of South Georgia, which is a British territory close to the Falklands. It's one of the main breeding colonies for King Penguins.
Source: Liam Quinn on flickr.com and dailymail.co.uk
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