TRAFFIC OF PENGUINS

Grey River Argus, 27 December 1941, Page 2

TRAFFIC OF PENGUINS

After many years of exhortation, by the spoken and written word, plenty of pedestrians in New Zealand cities give little heed to the footpath notices: “keep to the left. In that respect they have something to learn from penguins. In “Sorrows and Joys of a New Zealand Naturalist,’’ the late Mr. H. Guthrie Smith tells how he found much interest in observation of troops of penguins on an island of the Bounty group. “We could mark their landward set, iw wrote “We could note, too, at their meeting at the quays of ingress and egress the double stream of clean and dirty birds, the one ascehding purified from the bath, the other coming down guanoed and defiled. It my memory serves me, these two currents held right and left as scrupulously as London City’s midday throng. Where a track narrowed, the flippers otherwise loosely worn, were tightly compressed, the clean birds drawing aside to avoid contact with the unwashed.”