In Chile, A Retired Kindergarten Teacher Guards The Only Continental Colony Of King Penguins On Earth

EDIT

Early explorers named it Useless Bay because those same shores made landing boats, including industrial fishing vessels, nearly impossible. Still, humans remained such a threat that no permanent colony of king penguins formed here until 2010. Then, as a colony started to develop, a local landowner and former kindergarten teacher Cecilia Durán Gafo, now 72, decided she would protect them. Today, she runs a reserve that oversees the only continental king penguin colony in the world, one that has grown from a handful of penguins to nearly 200.

“It was only thanks to the reserve that [the penguins] got a safe space where they could build up and establish a colony,” says Dr Klemens Pütz, scientific director at the Antarctic Research Trust.Durán’s reserve is part of a growing global trend. A 2022 study in Nature Ecology and Evolution, assessing more than 15,000 private protected areas, found they helped to conserve underrepresented biomes and highly threatened regions that government action alone could not reach.

EDIT

After that, the penguins avoided settling in the bay for more than a decade. And when they reappeared overnight in 2010, Durán says, people began stealing eggs and mistreating them again almost immediately. “They dressed them up in caps and sunglasses, and took selfies,” she recalls. “Horrible things.” The population quickly collapsed. Of the 90 king penguins, only eight remained a year later. Durán called a family meeting, convinced they had to do something to protect the penguins. “But who was going to do it? ‘Mom! my two daughters said in unison.’”

So she began patrolling the beach. “Every day I came out here with a thermos and a sandwich. I’d spend the whole day, frozen to the bone … making sure people didn’t disturb the penguins.”The next year, Durán fenced off 30 hectares (74 acres) of her nearly 1,000-hectare farm as a protected area, allowing visitors to watch the penguins, but only from a distance.Keeping humans out was only half the battle, though. Minks and grey foxes, invasive species introduced to Tierra del Fuego in the 20th century, posed a novel threat to the penguins, which have no natural land predators. “The mink doesn’t attack the adults, but goes for the chicks and the eggs. At first, only one or two penguin chicks survived. Then we started our years-long battle,” says Durán.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/14/continental-king-penguin-colony-useless-bay-chile