Seabirds and shorebirds
Raising Chicken
Jessica Kemper
Animal Demography Unit
Photo Jessica Kemper
Chicken and his best buddy Pengie (15cm tall)
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Despite his name, Chicken is actually an African Penguin. He was one day old when I found him during a routine
penguin count on 25 June 2002 in the old kitchen of the dilapidated main building on Halifax Island, Namibia. Chicken
was lying in his nest next to his marginally older, dead sibling, clearly abandoned by his parents, and was screaming
his lungs out for food. Normally I would not take any abandoned hatchlings in for rehabilitation, but something
inexplicable (perhaps because I know his parents well) made me wrap him up in my T-shirt, stick him into a rusty
coffee tin which I found on the beach, balance the tin delicately between my knees while paddling back to the
mainland, drive him home and take on the challenge of turning a 52g, still blind, half-frozen and starved chick
into a beautiful and confident 3.2kg fledgling. And no, I have no idea why I called him Chicken, he just looked
like that was his name.
Chicken at 2 weeks, about to be fed
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Chicken exploring the kitchen table and reading the newspaper, which I had used as makeshift wallpaper to control the damage to my kitchen wall
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Raising Chicken certainly had its moments, like having to take him along to a conference in Swakopmund
(800km by car) during the first week of his life, together with all his equipment (hotwater bottles, fish,
syringes, towels, toilet paper, tweezers, kettle, vitamins, blender, heater, more toilet paper...). Or
having my kitchen walls constantly covered in fishblood, fishscales and Chicken-sneezes…or introducing
Chicken to the concept of other penguins, and finally having to brave 16 hours in a rickety boat on a very
bouncy sea to deliver Chicken to Mercury Island. But then again, Chicken also taught me a lot of things,
like how to enthusiastically blend large amounts of raw fish at 6 o'clock in the morning, or how to crush
vitamin tablets without them hopping off the table. More importantly, he also introduced me to many subtle
nuances of chick behaviour and development that were completely new to me and gave me numerous lessons in
advanced penguin-speak.
Posing next to his coffee-tin, in which he made his first Atlantic crossing
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Packing Chicken in a crate to take him to Mercury Island
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Chicken spent the first month of his life on the kitchen table inside a large red coolerbox, then moved to
the lounge and an even more spacious blue plastic trunk complete with beach. The state of my lounge did not
really improve during this time as Chicken soon turned into an expert digger and often spent his evenings
enthusiastically excavating his beach, covering everything within a 5m radius with sand. As soon as he was old
enough, he moved to the rehab pen in Lüderitz, and finally the rehab pen on Mercury Island. During the 10 days
he spent on Mercury, he was encouraged to mingle with the penguins in the colonies and at the water's edge, and
finally, on 25 October 2002, Chicken decided that clearly he was a penguin after all and it was time to hop in
the sea and swim north in search of fish and fortune.
Photo
Heading out of Lüderitz harbour on board the RV Kuiseb
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Photo
Arriving at Mercury Island
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After Chicken, I'm definitely not going to take on another hatchling for a while and am looking forward
to some quieter times, without 3-hourly feeding sessions or daily lounge de-beaching exercises, but in
retrospect, it was great having him around and I hope to see him again in about a year's time when he should
reappear on one of the islands for his moult.
Just before fledging
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