The sight of a seemingly endless gaggles of penguins is only one of the mind-boggling elements of an Antarctic voyage. Another is the ear-splitting cacophony of said colony.
Although not all of us will be lucky enough to hear this din for ourselves, a recent video taken by adventurer Chris Long brought it to life perfectly.
“That’s quite a chorus!”, says Oceanwide Expeditions while sharing the footage on Instagram. “These king penguins at Right Whale Bay, South Georgia, gave our guests a raucous greeting beneath drizzly, sub-Antarctic skies.”
In the video, the camera pans around as countless king penguins – both adults and juveniles – stand side-by-side against the grey sky.
The scene might look calm but that all changes as soon as you turn the sound on and the air is filled with the calls of penguins.
Calling out to each other helps penguin pairs locate their partner in a busy colony like this one. According to a paper published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, the calls of individual king penguins have their own distinctive features.
“Birds returning from foraging at sea find their mate in the crowded colony using acoustic signals,” write the authors in the paper. “In this study it was found that the king penguin vocalises in response to the mate’s playback calls, but not to those of neighbours.”
This article by Melissa Hobson was first published by Discover Wildlife on 19 March 2026. Lead Image: Chris Long.
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