The Boy and the African Penguin

Leo is a curious boy who loves science, and when his teacher assigns an animal project, he eagerly picks penguins. At home, he tells his mother that penguins live in icy, snowy places, and together they visit the library to learn more. There, Leo reads about emperor penguins in Antarctica and penguins in New Zealand and Australia. Then he discovers a page that changes his idea completely: the African penguin, a bird that lives on the sandy coasts of southern Africa, digs burrows in the sand to stay cool, and has bare pink skin above its eyes that helps it lose heat. Africa is hot, Leo thinks, yet here is a penguin standing on warm sand.

This discovery sparks Leo's imagination. He pictures a small African penguin waddling out of a burrow and telling him it likes the warmth, and he writes in his green notebook that African penguins belong to warm sand, not ice. At school, he draws two homes side by side, one snowy and one sandy, and colors the African penguin with its pink eye patches and black chest stripe. When he presents his work, his classmates are surprised that a penguin could live somewhere warm, and their questions push him to explain how the burrow keeps the bird cool and how it swims in the ocean but rests on the sand. Written by Ebru Mina TOMURCUK, this tale can be read on Onlinemasal Com.Tr.