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In the subantarctic region of the Southern Ocean, roughly halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica lies Macquarie Island. Although it is closer to New Zealand, Australia, in fact, owns the island.  Not that the royal penguin cares – it has called the island its (only) home for tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of years, relying on its rocky shores and tussock-covered slopes for breeding, nesting, and raising its chicks in one of the most remote and windswept environments on Earth.  It is the only place on Earth (apart from two small islets about 30 miles away where around 1,000 breed) that the royal penguin mates and reproduces. Image Credit

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So, why the name? This is almost always the first question that people ask when they first come across the royal penguin.  We’re not really sure when they acquired their common name, but it is likely that it was at around the same time that they were first recorded by European sealers in 1810 (and that was an oh dear moment for the species, to say the very least).  The sealers were no doubt struck by the bird’s bright yellow crest, which resembles a crown or royal ornament.  They were also struck, no doubt, by the opportunity the royal penguin presented to make some money. More about that sad chapter later.

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After their “discovery”, it took over 60 years for them to be described scientifically (more about why later) when German zoologist Otto Finsch gave them the name Eudyptes schlegeli (itself in honor of a German ornithologist by the name of Hermann Schlegel).  Finsch was a museum-based zoologist, not a field explorer in the subantarctic.  He described the royal penguin in 1876 using specimens that had been collected earlier by sealers and scientific expeditions.  

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You might wonder why a scientific description was done at a distance of thousands of miles. This was because travelling to remote, dangerous places like Macquarie Island was slow, expensive, and risky in the nineteenth century, so specialisation developed: collectors gathered specimens in the field, while taxonomists described and named them at home. So, it is very unlikely that Finsch (died 1917) ever saw a living penguin - let alone a royal one. The first penguins in a zoo outside the Southern Hemisphere were king penguins brought to Scotland’s Edinburgh Zoo in 1914, (making it the first place in the world to house and breed penguins in captivity).

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Do you remember seeing royal penguins in a zoo?  If you think you do, then I’m afraid you would be wrong.  Royal penguins have never been held in zoos.  This is because they breed only on their remote subantarctic island, have very specialised cold‑water and nesting requirements, and are difficult to transport and care for outside their natural environment. Modern zoos focus on penguin species that adapt more easily to captivity, such as king, gentoo, African, and rockhopper - royal penguins are an impractical species for captive display.

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What you may have seen in a zoo are macaroni penguins (pictured on the right and not named because of the pasta but because of the flamboyant yellow crest feathers that reminded 18th‑century Europeans of “macaronis,” young men who dressed in an exaggerated, fashionable style). The penguin and the pasta share a similar-sounding name, but the origins are completely unrelated. At first sight, you can see there are similarities. Yet royal penguins (left) have a white face and a neat, symmetrical yellow crest and breed only on Macquarie Island, while macaroni penguins have a black face, bushier crest, and breed across many subantarctic islands (and also in some zoos). Royals are sometimes considered a separate species, but they can interbreed with macaronis where ranges overlap.

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The interbreeding raises questions. Arguments among zoologists are ongoing as to whether the royal and the macaroni are separate species or the same.  The fact that when interbreeding takes place, the offspring can go on to reproduce at maturity points towards them being the same species. However, many prefer to think that what we are seeing is evolution in progress. In other words, when the two types of penguin separated (geographically) it has been long enough for significant physical differences to evolve, but not quite speciation, which is the point at which two populations have become fully distinct species that can no longer interbreed successfully under natural conditions.

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When the penguins arrive on the island each September, they make their way to their long-established colonies (there are more than 50 on the island). The pathways you can see in these pictures are not human-made, but are instead penguin highways formed over decades of repeated use. As thousands of royal penguins walk between the ocean and their nesting colonies, they compress the vegetation and soil, gradually carving out clear routes. These trails allow the penguins to move efficiently and safely, avoiding obstacles while conserving energy. Over generations, the constant traffic has created permanent paths that mark the landscape, a living testament to the daily routines of the island’s resident penguins.

The colonies can be quite large...

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Apparently, visitors smell a colony even before they can hear it (it's loud).  You can probably guess why it is so smelly, but why the volume?

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Well, arguments do happen.

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Did I say that arguments happen? Bickering with the neighbors is an art from on Macquarie Island.

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In terms of the propagation of the species, the royal penguin has an unusual method. It lays two eggs. Nothing unusual in that per se, but bizarrely to us, when the second egg is laid, the first is tipped out of the scrape (the shallow depression in the soil that the penguin makes rather than a nest). This happens because the first egg, called the A-egg, is smaller and less likely to survive. By discarding it, the parents can focus all their energy and resources on incubating and feeding the larger, stronger B-egg, giving at least one chick the best chance of survival in the harsh subantarctic environment. Occasionally, however, both eggs do hatch, though the chick from the A-egg usually struggles to compete and rarely survives. So, they don’t go in for the heir and a spare idea, at least not in one go.

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However, royals live to about 20 and so that means they could produce about 15 chicks per pair over a lifetime.  There is, of course, another however. Taking into account that about 30% of the chicks never make it off the island (some, for example, get squished by elephant seals like the one above) and then when they do around another 40% of them are lost to predation and harsh ocean conditions - out of this possible 15 a maximum of 5 will return to breed. So, it is important that they have as good a start to life as is possible on the island.

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So, the egg has a pretty thick shell for a bird of this size. This has evolved because it needs to be able to withstand not only the cold but also the terrain while the chick inside develops (it takes about 32 days to hatch). The yolk of the egg is rather larger than you might expect too.  This is associated with chicks born in an advanced stage of development, known as “precocial” chicks. This means that when the chick hatches, it is relatively well-formed, with enough strength and coordination to move around, maintain some body heat, and beg for food almost immediately. In harsh environments like Macquarie Island, being born at this advanced stage greatly increases the chick’s chances of survival.

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The development of the chick once it has hatched is, likewise astonishingly fast (at least by our standards).  The mother goes back to the sea to return with food (krill, small fish and the occasional squid) to feed the hungry chick (and the father).  

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For mom, it's eight weeks of back and forth, back and forth. She will lose about a quarter of her body weight over this time. Plus, if the mother is predated or doesn’t return for any other reason, then it will die.  Once a month has passed, the chick will move itself to a nursery full of its peers, while both parents go out for food.  Once the chick is this size, it takes the efforts of both parents to feed it, which they do with great dedication and persistence, ensuring the chick grows rapidly and gains the strength it needs to survive the harsh subantarctic environment.

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Here is another trick the royal penguin has up its sleeve. Macquarie Island is home to around 50 to 60 royal penguin colonies, mostly along the northern and eastern shores where the terrain is suitable for nesting. Each colony can contain thousands of breeding pairs. During the breeding season, royal penguins hunt in localised areas in conjunction with neighbouring colonies, effectively sectoring off fishing zones and nearly eliminating competition for food. This remarkable cohabitation allows multiple colonies to thrive side by side while sharing the surrounding ocean resources efficiently.  How the penguins instinctively know how to do this is fascinating but the mechanics of this behavior are still being studied and are not yet fully understood.

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After another month the chicks will have full adult plumage and will then make their way to the sea to hunt food on their own.  The cycle is complete – these chicks will return to the island to mate and have their own chicks.  Considering how quickly they reach adulthood, it is a surprise to discover that they will not mate until they are between four and six years old. Royal penguins are truly oceanic during their youth, spending several years entirely in the water before ever returning to the island. And boy, can they swim.

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This circle of life went uninterrupted for countless millennia until the arrival of the European sealers mentioned at the beginning of this article.  People slaughtered royal (and king) penguins by the tens of thousands each year to extract their fat. The birds were boiled or rendered to produce penguin oil, which was used for lighting lamps, lubrication, and soap-making. Between 1870 and 1919, the Tasmanian government issued licences allowing hunters to kill these birds, with an average of around 150,000 penguins taken each year. At the height of the industry in 1905, a processing plant on Macquarie Island was rendering as many as 2,000 penguins at a time, each yielding roughly half a litre of oil. This industrial-scale hunting caused massive population declines, destroyed chicks and eggs, and left colonies struggling to recover until sealing ended and conservation efforts began.

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Although the relics of this industry have now been removed, the photo above was taken by Dr Mary Gilham in 1959.  These are the boilers used by the sealers to process the animals they killed, including the royal penguins.

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Of course, as well as the slaughter, the human visitors introduced (by design or accident) three small mammals - rats, rabbits, and cats.  The same old story, unfortunately. These invasive species wreaked havoc on the island’s ecosystem: rats and cats preyed on penguin eggs and chicks, while rabbits overgrazed the vegetation, destroying nesting habitats. It took decades of careful conservation work, culminating in a large-scale eradication program completed in 2014, to remove all three species and restore Macquarie Island as a safe breeding ground for royal penguins and other wildlife. This was one of the largest island restoration projects in the world, involving baiting, trapping, and monitoring over several years, so at least we have done something to correct our past errors.

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As such, it is estimated that the island now has at least three quarters of a million breeding pairs of royal penguins. Although this is a large number, it is thought that before Europeans stepped foot on the islands there were millions. So, there is still some way to go to restore the penguin’s previous population.  Yet where there is life, there is hope.  With the rats, cats and rabbits now gone (as is the penguin oil industry) the royal penguin is again left to its own devices. Let’s hope they continue to thrive on Macquarie Island forever.

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