Melbourne, Australia — The only emperor penguin known to have swum from Antarctica to Australia was released into the sea 20 days after waddling onto a popular tourist beach, officials said Friday.
The adult male was found on November 1 on the sand dunes of Ocean Beach in the town of Denmark in temperate southwest Australia, about 2,200 miles north of the icy waters of the Antarctic coast , the Western Australian state government said. He was released from a Parks and Wildlife Service boat Wednesday.
The boat traveled for several hours from Albany, the state’s southernmost city, before the penguin was released into the Southern Ocean, but the government did not indicate the distance in its statement.
He had been cared for by registered wildlife carer Carol Biddulph, who named him Gus in honor of the first Roman emperor Augustus.
“At first I really didn’t know if he was going to make it because he was so malnourished,” Biddulph said in a video recorded before the bird’s release and shared by the government on Friday.
“I’m going to miss Gus. The last few weeks have been incredible, something I wouldn’t have missed,” she added.
Biddulph said she had discovered while caring for other species of solitary penguins that mirrors were an important part of their rehabilitation by providing a comforting sense of companionship.
“He loves his large mirror and I think it has been crucial to his well-being. They are social birds and he hangs next to the mirror most of the time,” she said.
Gus gained weight under his care, going from 47 pounds when he was found to 54 pounds. It measures 39 inches. A healthy male emperor penguin can weigh more than 100 pounds.
The largest penguin species has never been recorded in Australia before, said Belinda Cannell, a researcher at the University of Western Australia, although some have reached New Zealand, almost all of which is further south than Western Australia.
The government said that as summer approached in the southern hemisphere, it was crucial to return Gus to the ocean where he could regulate his temperature.
Emperor penguins are known to travel up to 1,000 miles on foraging trips that last up to a month, the government said.
They are part of the species directly threatened by increasing temperature of oceans and seas across the world. About three-quarters of the world’s breeding emperor penguin colonies are vulnerable to annual sea fluctuations, according to the World Wildlife Foundation. ice cover in Antarcticawhich have become much more irregular due to climate change.
Penguins breed and live on sea ice, but Antarctic sea ice is disappearing as our planet warms.
“They show up in the breeding season and the ice isn’t there, so they don’t have anywhere to breed,” Dr. Birgitte McDonald, an ecologist at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, funded and administered by the University of California. San Jose State. told CBS San Francisco last year.
An analysis by scientists at the University of Cambridge, published last year in the journal Science Newsfound that “the ice in one area was melting particularly early in the year,” putting emperor chicks at extreme risk.