March of the Penguins

Literally - the "March of the Penguins" Magellanic Penguins leaving their burrows to make a short march to Otway Bay to swim and hunt for food! These guys were so wonderful!
Penguins only live in the southern hemisphere. Here is a helpful description about several types of penguins (as shared with me by Lyle):
HOW TO IDENTIFY THE PENGUINS
Chinstrap: have a thin black line under their chin. These cute penguins are the sentimental favorite of most tourists. They wear a "helmet strap" and innocent expression. The Chinstrap penguins have a large population and favor the South Shetland Islands.
Gentoo: have a white triangular patch over the eye. You will see this coral-orange beaked penguin on the Antarctica Peninsula, South Georgia Island and in other areas.
Adelie: have a small white ring around their eyes. This white-circled-eye penguin bursts with curiosity, to the delight of visitors. The population is large. Some colonies number 100,000 birds.
Rockhopper: have spiked yellow feathers drooping from each side of the head. They are aptly named because the birds hop from rock to rock when climbing steep slopes to reach their high cliff nests. You'll see them in the Falkland Islands.
Macaroni: have spiked yellow feathers on top of the head. These weird-looking penguins are related to the rockhoppers. Like them, they have grasping feet, allowing them to climb precipitous, rugged slopes to reach their high-cliff nests. South Georgia Island is a popular breeding ground.
Emperor: have a fuzzy edged orange-yellow patch on their cheek. They're the world's largest and most famous penguin. You could possibly see them, but the chances are low because their breeding grounds are distant from standard Antarctica cruise routes.
King: have a solid curvaceous orange-yellow patch behind each cheek. They are closely related to the Emperor penguins, but are smaller and greater in number. Viewing opportunities are good on South Georgia Island, but not on the Falklands and in the Antarctica Peninsula.

SOME PENGUIN FACTS
There are many different species of penguins in Antarctica, including the huge and colorful emperor penguin, the smaller Adelie, the gentoo, the chinstrap penguin, the rockhopper, the king, and the macaroni. Penguins are great swimmers. They can swim very fast, if they're trying, for instance, to escape the jaws of a leopard seal, they can shoot out of the water 7 feet into the air onto a safe ice floe.
Penguins have feathers to keep them warm right? Well partly right, feathers work on land, but in the water where penguins spend quite a bit of their lives, they're not so valuable. What really keeps penguins warm in the sea is a sub-cutaneous (under-the-skin) layer of fat. This fat layer is the best form of internal insulation yet devised by mother nature and it keeps all warm blooded cold water animals operational down to 25.8°F. That is when sea-water freezes, you can't get sea water colder than that without it being solid and then it would difficult for anything to swim in it!
The penguins fat layer that protects them against the cold more than anything while in the sea. On the land however their feathers have a very valuable function in keeping them warm. Penguin feathers aren't like the large flat feathers that flying birds have, they are short with an under-layer of fine woolly down. Penguin feathers are also very good at shedding water when the bird emerges from the sea. They overlap and give a good streamlined effect in the water and excellent wind-shedding abilities when on the land. When it gets very cold, penguins can puff their feathers out to trap more air for even better insulation. When it gets too hot (like as high as freezing point even!) they fluff their feathers out even more so that the trapped warm air can escape and enable the penguin to cool down.
Penguins have two areas where their body is very poorly insulated and where they can lose a lot of heat; these are their flippers and their feet. These regions give penguins at the same time a problem and a solution. A problem because of the heat loss, and a solution because they can be used for cooling down. The muscles that operate feet and flippers are not located in the feet and flippers, but deeper in the warmer regions of the penguins body. The feet and flippers are moved by tendons that pass through them and attach to toes etc. like a sort of remote operation by wire or string. This means that it doesn't matter if the feet and flippers get really cold as they can still be operated normally by regions that are fully functional and at normal body temperature.
Penguins have a heat-exchange blood-flow to these regions. The warm blood entering the feet or flippers flows past cold blood leaving so warming it up in the process and cooling the blood entering at the same time. Blood in these parts is significantly colder than in the rest of the body. By the time the blood re-enters the rest of the body it has been warmed up and so doesn't have so great an effect on the core body temperature. Penguins feet are never allowed to get below freezing point, blood flow is finely adjusted so that they are kept just above. When it gets very cold, the feet are covered by the feathers and fat layer of the body so they are not exposed to cooling winds. So while a man standing barefoot on ice would quickly get frostbitten, penguins can do so all their lives with no damage at all. At low temperatures or when in the sea, the blood flow to feet and flippers is very low anyway so reducing heat loss further. When the penguin needs to lose heat quickly, the blood flow to these extremities is increased and so lots of warm blood enters them which cools quickly so dumping excess heat rapidly and efficiently. When it's really cold, they rock backwards on their heels, holding their toes up. How do they stop themselves from falling over backwards? They support themselves by their stiff tail feathers that have no blood flow and so lose no heat.