For Belgian photographer Yves Adams, finding a yellow king penguin on the island of South Georgia was like winning the “nature lottery.”
Adams recently posted an adorable photograph of a yellow king penguin, a rare specimen he found on the remote island of South Georgia in December 2019, but posted the photos a few days ago, The Independent reported.
Rare Yellow Penguin
The photographer recounted that shortly after landing on a remote beach on South Georgia Island, the yellow penguin walked directly toward them “amid chaos full of sea lions and Antarctic wolves,” as well as other emperor penguins, only the others were black and white.
“I was very lucky,” wrote Adams.
“I’ve never seen or heard of a yellow penguin before. There were 120,000 birds on that beach and this was the only yellow one, “Adams told The Independent.
“One of the birds looked really strange and when I looked closer it was yellow. We all went crazy when we found out. We dropped all the security equipment and grabbed our cameras,” added the photographer quoted by the English newspaper.
According to him, this yellow penguin has leucism. This is a rare genetic condition that causes the animal’s fur or feathers to be white and also have yellow pigments.
This yellow penguin is part of a colony of king penguins, usually black and white, that inhabit the South Island of Georgia.
This is the second largest penguin species in the world behind the emperors. Although they spend much of their time at sea, where they subsist on a diet of lanternfish, they go ashore to incubate their eggs and raise chicks.
Over the past century, the number of king penguins has increased substantially in South Georgia.