King penguin swims hundreds of miles from Antarctic to show up on Australian beach

‘It was young bird... probably never encountered a human before’

A king penguin was spotted at a south Australian beach, about hundreds of miles from its home in the Antarctic.

“We were up high on the beach. We stopped and it kept on walking up towards us," said Jeff Campbell, president of Friends of Shorebirds South East, which was doing a survey of bird population in Kingston South East when it encountered the penguin.

"Then it did some displays towards us and then did its really strange braying calls, putting its head back and then bowing to us and then it came really, really close to us. We didn’t go toward it; it came toward us,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as he theorised that the bird might have “never seen a human before”.

"It was a young bird. It’s come from a sub-Antarctic island like Heard Island or Macquarie Island and has landed here, so [it’s] probably never encountered a human before and didn’t know humans could be dangerous,” he told the outlet.

Though it was a surprise, Mr Campbell said, the long journey of penguins from was not unheard of. A king penguin was spotted at Port MacDonnell, near Mount Gambier about two decades ago, in 2004.

Dr Julie Mc Innes, from the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, Ecology and Biodiversity, told the Guardian that it would have possibly come to the mainland “to moult” – a period when penguins shed all feathers.

It typically takes three to four weeks and often begins around February, according to New Zealand’s Yellow-eye Penguin Trust. “During the moult, because plumage is not waterproof and the body is not well insulated, they cannot go to sea to feed, and may lose three to four kg in weight.

“They are confined to shore as they wait for their old feather coat to be replaced,” read the organisation’s website.