Birds - Adele penguins on Paulet Island, Antarctica - postcard

Postcard
• Picture / Image:  Paulet Island, Antarctica by Gunter Lenz - includes a group of Adelie penguins
• Publisher:  BBC Wildlife Magazine and the Natural History Museum, London, 1999
• Postally used:  no
• Stamp:  n/a
• Postmark(s):  n/a
• Sent to:  n/a
• Notes / condition:  slighthly larger card

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Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information (internal links may not  work) :

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Paulet Island is a circular island about 1.5 km (0.93 mi) in diameter, lying 4.5 km (2.8 mi) south-east of Dundee Island, off the north-eastern end of the Antarctic Peninsula. Because of its large penguin colony, it is a popular destination for sightseeing tours

The island is composed of lava flows capped by a cinder cone with a small summit crater. Geothermal heat keeps parts of the island ice-free, and the youthful morphology of the volcano suggests that it was last active within the last 1,000 years.^[1]

Paulet Island was discovered by a British expedition (1839–1843) under James Clark Ross and named by him for Captain the Right Honorable Lord George Paulet, Royal Navy. In 1903 during the Swedish Antarctic Expedition led by Otto Nordenskiöld his ship Antarctic was crushed and sunk by the ice off the coast of the island.

The island has been identified as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International because it supports a very large breeding colony of about 100,000 pairs of Adélie Penguins. Other birds known to nest on the island include Imperial Shags, Snow Petrels and Kelp Gulls.^[2]

The Adélie Penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) is a species of penguin common along the entire Antarctic coast, which is their only residence. They are among the most southerly distributed of all seabirds, as are the Emperor Penguin, the South Polar Skua, the Wilson's Storm Petrel, the Snow Petrel, and the Antarctic Petrel. In 1840, French explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville named them for his wife, Adèle.

The Adélie Penguin is one of three species in the genus Pygoscelis. Mitochondrial and nuclear DNA evidence suggests the genus split from other penguins around 38 million years ago, about 2 million years after the ancestors of the genus Aptenodytes. In turn, the Adélie penguins split off from the other members of the genus around 19 million years ago.^[2]

There are estimated to be a total of 2.4-3.2 million breeding pairs of Adélie penguins; they are distributed around the coastline of the Antarctic continent, though few penguins appear to breed in the quarter of the continent eastwards of the Antarctic Peninsula, with only a few small colonies identified. During the breeding season, they congregate in large breeding colonies, some over a quarter of a million pairs.^[3] Individual colonies can vary dramatically in size, and some may be particularly vulnerable to climate fluctuations.^[4]

The Adélie penguins breed from October to February on shores around the Antarctic continent. Adélies build rough nests of stones. Two eggs are laid, these are incubated for 32 to 34 days by the parents taking turns (shifts typically last for 12 days). The chicks remain in the nest for 22 days before joining crèches. The chicks moult into their juvenile plumage and go out to sea after 50 to 60 days.

type=printed postcards

theme=animals

sub-theme=birds

county/ country=antarctica

number of items=single

period=1945 - present

postage condition=unposted