February 26, 2015
Gentoo penguins stand at the Penguin & Puffin Coast exhibit on Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2015 at the St. Louis Zoo. The exhibit has been closed to the public for construction of a neighboring polar bear area. Photo by Huy Mach, hmach@post-dispatch.com
The excitement was palpable one recent morning among the St. Louis Zoo’s penguins. The stately kings paced anxiously, always keeping close to their partners (and nests). The slightly smaller gentoos waddled back and forth, occasionally letting out a trumpeting squawk. The little rockhoppers, with their punk hairdos, bounced around like wind-up toys.
Were they excited because the zoo’s Penguin & Puffin Coast was about to reopen after 18 months? Not really. The excitement had to do with the fact that breakfast was coming.
To mark the return of Penguin & Puffin Coast, which reopens March 5 with a penguin parade, the zoo let me play penguin keeper for a morning. I was game even after learning that my first job would be pushing pills into dead fish, and that I would do it while wearing wading boots and rubber overalls called “yellows.”
Samantha Griffin, an actual penguin keeper, led the way. Thoughtfully, she had saved some fish for me to stuff with vitamin pills, including vitamin E to supplement what’s lost when fish is frozen. Griffin, by the way, doesn’t eat fish, but she insists that has nothing to do with her job.
I turned out to be a natural at pilling fish, if I do say so myself. The vitamins, about the size of half an adult multi, go into a gill, not down the gullet, and the only trick is not breaking through the body of the fish.
The pill-stuffed fish are piled in a bowl to be hand-fed to the penguins, to make sure everybody gets one.
The rest of the birds’ breakfast (they are also fed supper) is served on trays, with two daily meals of capelin, a sustainable Atlantic fish that’s the mainstay of their diet, and smelt. “It’s close to what they get in the wild,” Griffin said.
The puffins, being smaller, get a mixture of herring, squid and krill, weighed and chopped. This is as gross as penguin-feeding gets, but it goes quickly. So does loading the trays for the penguins, with a layer of crushed ice, then both kinds of fish, and then more ice. The habitat is kept at a chilly 45 degrees, but the penguins like to snack all day, so the ice keeps the fish extra fresh.
The trays fill a heavy cart, and then it’s up an elevator to the back door of Penguin Cove, on the opposite side from where visitors will again get to watch the penguins beginning next week.
The most dangerous part of a penguin keeper’s job, it seemed to me, is navigating the wet rocks on which the birds hang out. Tumbling into the penguin pool would have been awkward and most likely painful, so I tended to stand back and let the penguins come to me for their vitamin-stuffed fish.
Some were eager; others, suspicious. Penguins have personalities, and they know their keepers; despite my yellows, I was a stranger. One older gentoo with bad eyesight wanted her smelt held a particular way, and I failed. A voracious younger one kept trying to trick me into feeding him twice.
The beautiful, stately kings, grouped together at the far end of the habitat, by their nests, hung back, and only one eventually approached close enough to take a fish from me. Griffin, more familiar to them, took over the job.
Then we returned for the trays, each of which slips into a holder for a shared meal. The only trick here was keeping Woody, a little rockhopper that was hand-raised, from waddling out to explore every time the gate was opened. Pretty soon, I was considering taking Woody home with me.
Successfully completing my feeding duty, I got to walk around to the other side of Penguin Cove to see what visitors see, including an underwater view of penguins as they swim. Penguin Cove is modeled after the coastal cliffs of the island of South Georgia, a British territory in the southern Atlantic that many species of penguins call home.
Those weird sounds? They are meant to mimic the ocean and other sounds that would be heard in the natural habitat.
Around the corner from Penguin Cove is Puffin Bay, where horned puffins and tufted puffins were just beginning to develop their bright breeding colors. Nooks in the cliff wall lead to nests where the puffins will lay their eggs. And that thing that’s not a puffin? It’s the survivor of a pair of king eiders, a dramatic looking duck.
Penguin & Puffin Coast, which opened in 2003, is also home to endangered Humboldt penguins, which returned to their outdoor habitat in October. The indoor exhibits were closed for safety reasons during construction of Polar Bear Point next door, due to open this summer.
Maybe you won’t get to stuff pills into dead fish, but if you want to get up close and personal with penguins, one of the zoo’s popular behind-the-scenes tours lets you mingle with a couple of them. If you go, tell them I said hello.
What Penguin & Puffin Coast reopening • When Parade of king and gentoo penguins is at 10:30 a.m. March 5; zoo hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily • Where St. Louis Zoo, Forest Park • How much Free • More info stlzoo.org
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