What I learned on a mission to see all 18 species

September 6, 2025 — 12:00am

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In the darkest days of 2020, when the pandemic left me flightless as a penguin, I used a tiny bit of my government welfare money to pay for a photobook. It was supposed to cover a happy decade as a travel writer, filled with photos from seven continents and 100-plus countries. Instead, it seemed to focus primarily on Antarctica, and within that, there was a clear subgenre – penguins, in portrait and en masse, their black and white colouring dominating like noise on a broken television.

Humboldt penguins… home among the guano.

By October that year, I’d found a way to escape my dismal little flat in Glasgow and run away to the Galapagos. Batteries of COVID-19 tests (no vaccine would be available for several months) and many masked plane hours later, I landed on those singular islands. Within days I was able to rent a little place and throw myself at the mercy of under-employed locals to look around. Towards the end of the stint there, swimming off Floreana Island, two Galapagos penguins approached me in the water, spinning around gracefully before they dove away to murder some small fish. Seeing them in the water, their untethered joy reminded me of a happier world, a simpler time before all the online quizzes and offline despair.

My travel writing career had allowed me to see a few different penguin species before that moment, but I wiped my slate clear and started again. The Galapagos bird would be penguin number one of 18, my spark bird. It seemed like a great idea to pursue this epiphany and start a quest, though I had no idea just how convoluted it would be.

I decided to call the resulting book An Inconvenience of Penguins, in part because the collective nouns for penguins are so boring – a raft when they’re swimming; a rookery when they’re nesting; a waddle when they’re walking. An inconvenience sounded funnier to me, and anyway, the mission I was about to embark upon would be very far from convenient.

I spent the next three years travelling the world in pursuit of penguins, fulfilling dozens of travel writing assignments to get me into their pungent environments. Europeans tend to think of penguins as exclusively cold-weather animals, but this is a wild misconception. Of the 18 species, only five breed in Antarctica – and some have adapted to live in warm environments, even deserts.

This was the case with the Humboldt penguins, about 25,000 of which live up and down the coasts of Peru and Chile. Their numbers have fluctuated wildly over the last century, but in southern Peru at Punta San Juan, they are thriving in a coastal reserve. Their neighbours include hundreds of thousands of guanay cormorants, birds that are such prolific defecators that they have created a white world of guano for the penguins to live in. I visited there with the help of the Punta San Juan Program, a charity that protects this remarkable – and remarkably stinky – ecosystem. Though the penguins were my primary focus, they were just part of a wider world for the conservationists, cogs in a complex marine environment.

That world of dried guano and salt-baked shores felt diametrically opposed to other penguin environments. There were birds burrowing in lawns on the Falkland Islands, others marching up snowy hills in South Georgia. And then, in New Zealand, the Fiordland penguins seemed to live on the forest moon of Endor, their penguin highways no longer leading across tundra, but up streams beneath giant ferns.

Not to play favourites but… King penguins are special.

As the months turned to years and word of my inconvenient project got out, people asked which was my favourite species. For a time, I diplomatically answered that I didn’t really have one and that all penguins were created equal. This is not, in fact, true. King penguins are my favourite – please don’t tell any of the others. There is something especially mesmeric in the turmeric colouring on their heads, the flawless sunset gradient on their throats, and the intense satsuma shading of their beaks. An adult King has about 200,000 feathers, and watching them preen, it seems they know the exact location of every single one.

I have a great fondness for other species too, of course. The pugnacious Southern Rockhoppers are so quick to violence that they always make me laugh. Similarly, the Adelies, the southernmost nesting of all penguins, are frequently so nuts that they would be intimidating were they not also so idiotically cute.

Along the way I learnt that there are thought to be more than 50 extinct species of penguin. In other words, there are almost three times more dead than are extant. Even knowing this, I still feel deep sadness every time I learn of another species being pushed to the brink. The Galapagos penguin finds itself a severe El Nino away from functional extinction – there are only about 3000 of those birds remaining, and all of them rely on the Humboldt Current reliably travelling up the west coast of South America to bring them food. El Ninos mess with that mighty flow, effectively starving the birds. Were a particularly disruptive event to occur, the penguins’ already low numbers would be sent into irreversible decline.

Southern Rockhopper… “so quick to violence they always make me laugh”.

There is similarly bad news for the Yellow-Eyed penguin – or Hoiho – on the South Island of New Zealand, where just a few hundred individuals remain. There’s another small population of these animals on some subantarctic islands, but considering the bird appears on the New Zealand five-dollar note, it struck me as remarkable that it too was sliding towards being unable to be saved.

The most surprising and perhaps grimmest fate belongs to the African penguin, however. Over a million visitors a year see a happy-looking colony bumbling around Boulders Beach on the outskirts of Cape Town. The abundance and apparent health of this small colony is likely to leave most witnesses impressed and hopeful that a penguin population could thrive so close to a major city in a country which faces unending economic challenges.

Adelie penguins: idiotically cute.

And it is true that the couple of thousand birds at that particular location are prospering, but it’s important to know that they are outliers. In the last century, an estimated 98 per cent of the African penguin population has disappeared, partly through the (now mercifully defunct) business of stealing their eggs and partly through the over-fishing of their waters. As their food source disappears and their numbers drop, they are also being outcompeted by other animals, especially fur seals, whose numbers have soared along the coast since great white sharks left the area.

Around the world there is huge fluctuation in the fortunes of penguins, and it’s not all bad news. Some species are seeing their numbers increase, their adaptability coupled with protections from humans allowing them to thrive. To my surprise, the greatest example of this is in Australia. While there are several charities in many nations fighting the penguin cause, nowhere has done quite such an efficient – even lucrative – job of saving the birds as Philip Island.

King penguin colony.

Despite the Little penguin being one of the easiest species to see, my visit to them came late in the project. By that point, several people had told me about the Philip Island program, many with sneers curling at the corners of their mouths. It was too commercial, they said, had a ridiculous amphitheatre and extortionate prices. There were whole shops filled with penguin-branded knickknacks. There was, of course, no way I was going to skip it.

Having already visited the town of Penguin in Tasmania, when I flew to Melbourne I knew this chapter would be like no other. Here was a bird living right next to a major city, the only nocturnal penguin – and one that was flourishing perhaps more than any of its cousins.

The vast non-profit operation on Philip Island was of course quite odd to see – a foyer the size of an aircraft carrier, with at least as much commercialism as foretold. But to witness the whole thing in motion, to see people willingly throw money towards the penguins, then to see that money spun to fund other conservation projects, it was all immensely hopeful. The Little penguin’s habit of coming to shore at the same time every night made them easier to monetise than any other species, but by the time I left Victoria, I couldn’t help wonder if this model could be exported. People often tell me how much they love penguins – why not ask them to pay for that love?

An Inconvenience of Penguins by Jamie Lafferty is published on 30 September by Wildfire (Hachette). RRP $34.99

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Jamie Lafferty is a writer and photographer based in Glasgow, Scotland. He has been to over 100 countries and all seven continents at least four times. He absolutely will steal your hotel’s shampoo when you aren’t looking.