Happy World Penguin Day!

It’s World Penguin Day! All around the world, today is the day to celebrate these comical, high contrast, cold weather birds who long ago traded the ability to fly for the ability to swim through the Antarctic waters with ease. At Safari Ltd.®, we love penguins so much, we have a dozen penguin products to choose from! In honor of Penguin Day, we thought we’d present you with some fun facts about our fine, feathered, flightless friends. So let’s get right to it!

Let’s address some common misconceptions for starters. First off, let’s get this out of the way once and for all: YES, penguins have knees, so stop asking! They might be hard to spot under their fluffy feathers, but they’re there, trust us. Also, penguins live almost entirely in the Southern Hemisphere, so you won’t find any at the North Pole, and they don’t have to worry about being eaten by polar bears (killer whales are a different story).

You probably picture penguins as black and white, which is normally the case. However, every so often a penguin is born with brown feathers instead of black. These colorful rarities are known as Isabelline penguins. It’s not the same as being albino (all white), but like albino animals, these penguins often don’t survive as long as their monochrome buddies, because they don’t blend in as well with their environment.  Penguins, being mostly bi-colored (two colored), have dark feathers on their backs and white feathers on their undersides. This helps them camouflage while swimming through the ocean, so predators above and below will have trouble seeing them.

They do occasionally get a little colorful, however, like the emperor penguin with its orange and yellow neck feathers, and the rockhopper penguin with its yellow crest feathers. So today, give a thought to our penguin friends, and for more penguiny fun, you can check out our latest penguin figure – the African penguin! And don’t forget our Penguins TOOB® and Emperor Penguin Chicks Good Luck Minis® while you’re at it!

Bernie's Bonus Fun Fact: Today’s penguins are fairly small compared to their prehistoric ancestors, some of which could grow up to six feet tall and weight 200 lbs.!