Douwe den Held Photographs by Anastasia Austin, The Guardian; How a kindergarten teacher became the accidental guardian of 200 king penguins
"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.
The first time Durán found king penguins nesting on her land was in the early 1990s. But soon after, she says, people claiming to be scientists arrived to take the birds away.
“They put [the penguins] in cages, and took them to Japan … supposedly for scientific research. Later, we found out [most] had gone to zoos [or homes] as pets,” Durán says...
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.’...
Her 12-person onsite team now includes biologists, veterinarians and ecotourism specialists. Ecotourism funds the operation, with an average of 15,000 visitors a year.
The team also regularly collaborates with universities to contribute to scientific penguin, bird and plant life research. Data collected has revealed that king penguins from colonies thousands of kilometres away are coming to the bay. These new arrivals immediately adapt to the local diet, in what scientists call “exceptional foraging plasticity”."
