The Picture Perfect Penguin Family

by guest blogger, Elmer Prather

My latest puzzle is a three hundred and fifty piece titled Penguin Family by Linda Thompson.

Pictures tell a story, and this puzzle picture displays a family of Emperor penguins. When I put puzzles together, I do some research about the story the picture tells. Emperor penguins live on the sea ice on the Antarctica Continent. The adult penguins in the picture are very attentive to their baby penguin. They are all standing on the shore since there are stones near their feet. The puzzle picture has a male, two females and a baby penguin. This is the first three-hundred-and-fifty-piece puzzle I have put together and was impressed at how the puzzle pieces were cut. Some of the pieces are large, some are medium and some are small. I found that these different size puzzle pieces are great for adults to put together along with their children.

The emperor penguin is one of the largest of this species. The average height is forty inches the male average weight is eighty-four lbs. and the female sixty-five lbs. Females lay one egg each year and the male penguin has a brood pouch that he rolls the egg into to keep it warm. It takes about sixty-five to seventy-five days for the chick to hatch. After approximately seven weeks the chicks cluster together, and form groups called creches. The male penguin will not eat for up to four months, from the time the mating pair arrive at the colony to breed until the egg has hatched and the mother returns from gorging herself with food to feed her chick. Males lose almost half of their body weight during this time. They need to rely entirely on the reserve of body fat they have built up during the summer feast to survive the long winter.

Penguins live in colonies of five to ten thousand per colony. Large colonies of penguins have been seen from space. During extremely cold weather these colonies will form a circle huddling together to keep warm. In colonies like this, they keep moving around slowly so some of them are on the outside in the cold and with them moving a little at the time, they rotate from the outside to the inside where it is warmer. There are currently close to 600,000 emperor penguins around the continent existing in approximately fifty colonies. Penguins’ diets consist of krill, squid, and fish. Emperor penguins can dive one thousand five hundred feet deep and when they do their heartbeat slows to just a few beats per minute. Penguins have waterproof feathers and a layer of blubber to keep them warm in temperatures that reach thirty degrees below zero. There are eighteen species of penguins of which some males and females’ mate for life. They do have the unique ability to recognize their birthing season mates and their chicks by the chirping sounds they make.

In closing I found that there is a World Penguin Day, and this year the date was April 25^th. “Happy penguin day.”

Penguin Family (Family Pieces 350 puzzle) by Linda Thompson