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Penguin Parade in Edinburgh Zoo.
Edinburgh’s long association with penguins owes its origins to the involvement of the Society’s first president, Lord Salvesen, a law lord related to the family who owned the Leith whaling fleet of the South Georgia Whaling Company. Today a relationship between a conservation zoo and whalers would surely be unthinkable, but for the young zoo the whalers provided a rare supply of wildlife from the Southern oceans—among them a seemingly endless quantity of penguins. The first six arrived in 1914, and were met without any great enthusiasm from Gillespic, who was far more interested in the elephant seals that accompanied them. But as more penguins arrived every year, so it became clear that these animals thrived in the mild Scottish climate. Over eight hundred penguins were brought to the city by Salvesens over the years, for Edinburgh and for other zoos, and at one time or another the zoo has had representatives of almost every penguin species, including the first Adelie penguins ever seen in Europe and the first New Zealand ‘fairy’ blue. In the 1950s a came an incident now preserved in folklore. A keeper accidentally left open a gate to the penguin pool, and was followed by a parade of penguins all around the zoo. It was the start of Edinburgh’s now famous ‘Penguin Parade’, an event still enjoyed not only by visitors every summer afternoon, but clearly also by the two thirds of the zoo’s 120 or so penguins who choose to join in.
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