Feb 122012
A keeper in the bird house took a call one day from a woman who insisted that there was a penguin sitting in a tree in her back yard. The keeper patiently explained that penguins are not found in the Midwest, and since they can’t fly, there is no way that one could have gotten to her back yard. And even if a penguin did somehow happen to end up there, it would not be able to sit up in a tree.
The woman, however, was having none of it — she knows what a penguin looks like, and this was definitely one!
The keeper never did convince the woman that the bird wasn’t a penguin, but she did ask the woman to describe the bird. From the description, it seemed most likely that the “penguin” was a black-crowned night heron.