“Fellow Creatures” is the first Penguin Blog written for Open Borders Press by Marcel Haenen, author of Penguins and People. Marcel has travelled the world to reconstruct the story of humanity’s relationship with penguins, consulting experts and meeting penguins around the globe. Penguins and People is not only a love letter to the world’s favourite flightless bird, but also an urgent call to action in the face of a collapsing climate. The book will be out in April 2026. Today, April 25, is World Penguin Day, and also marks twelve months until the publication of Penguins and People.
Fellow Creatures
Marcel Haenen
Most explorers who come across penguins for the first time are instantly captivated by the flightless bird. Penguins are second to none in beauty and manners. They are fearless as well as endearingly vulnerable, according to the travel journals of the seafarers surveying the cold bottom part of the Earth from the 1900s.
Some even speak of a shared, mutual affection. People find penguins charming not only because they are moved by the bird’s human-like features. The penguin, too, is said to harbor warm feelings for their larger, ungainly, earthly companions.
The American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson notes that penguins typically display curiosity rather than fear when they encounter humans. “Penguins acquainted with humans seem to accept us as only another quaint and somewhat clumsy kind of penguin, just as we tend to think of penguins as quaint and somewhat clumsy humans,” he writes in Penguins (1976).
In The Great White South (1921), Herbert Ponting, the English photographer who documented Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole (1910-1913), devotes a special chapter to the remarkable birds of Antarctica. It’s titled “The Real Inhabitants”. He describes the first emperor penguin he comes across as “a majesty”. The roughly 115-centimetre-tall emperor – the largest of the eighteen different penguin species – behaves like royalty.
Ponting is deeply impressed by the way the emperor penguins welcome the visitors from England. “The polished gentleman of the eternal snows bowed his head in greeting with a grace that a courtier might envy. He delivered a short speech in penguin language, to which we endeavoured to make appropriate replies.”
Like Simpson, Ponting is convinced that the penguins regard humans as “fellow creatures” – though considerably less graceful ones. “He must have thought us a set of dull-witted churls, as we stood there like yokels, in comparison with his perfect self-possession and faultless manners, making silly attempts to imitate him.”
Penguins colour the planet. “The Antarctic would be a dull place if indeed were it not for the penguins,” Scottish biologist James Murray writes in Antarctic Days, published in 1913. He recounts his experience as a crew member during the expedition to the South Pole region, carried out from 1907 to 1909 under the leadership of Irish polar explorer Ernest Shackleton aboard the ship Nimrod. Murray describes the largest of the penguins, the emperor penguin, as “the most curious, mysterious, humanlike beasts.”
The Scotsman expresses concern over the penguins’ innocence as they go about their ways. He is astonished by the naivety with which the bird approaches human visitors. “I have not seen him angry or excited. Whatever is done to him he looks at you with the same mild, inscrutable eye,” Murray notes. Penguins are too gentle, unsuspecting. “The bird gives the impression that he belongs to a civilization so much superior to ours that he cannot conceive that anything on two legs would hurt him. He is wrong.”
