Why the penguin is a thief and a sex pest!

By the time most people get to the end of the John Lewis Christmas ad about the little boy and Monty, his lovelorn penguin, they are wiping the tears from their eyes or launching into a ‘Bah, humbug!’ tirade about the commercialisation of Christmas. But not me. After a year of filming, 1,000 hours of footage and months of editing, I know Adelie penguins better than most and Monty, an Adelie created by computerised special effects, is astonishingly true to life. But though Adelies may be adorable, they are hardly the romantic gentlemen that John Lewis would have us believe. In fact, they are incorrigible philanderers. But while they have got most things right, the team behind the John Lewis ad made one mistake, or at least glossed over a distinctly unseasonal truth. As you listen to Tom Odell warbling his way through John Lennon’s Real Love and Monty stares balefully at one romantic couple after another, yearning for a girl of his own, you might imagine that Adelies were swan-like in their lifelong devotion to their mate. Far from it. They may be into sexual equality when it comes to dividing up domestic duties, sharing the feeding, nest-sitting and chick-raising between male and female, but they are surprisingly pragmatic when it comes to love, or rather, sex. In an environment as tough as the Antarctic, where the chances of a fully grown bird surviving from one year to the next are slim, it makes little sense to mate for life. Some penguins, such as Rockhoppers, practise monogamy, but for Adelies it’s a different mate every year. Each spring the male Adelie builds his pebbly nest — often stealing from his neighbour for raw materials — in the hope of attracting a female. But if he doesn’t, the mating instinct can prove overwhelming, a fact that led one of the first scientific papers on the species to be withheld from publication in the prudish early years of the last century. For if no willing female is to be found, frustrated male Adelie penguins will resort to chasing vigorously after other males and even, I’m afraid to say, attempting to mate with dead penguins. In these more enlightened times, not many would bat an eye over gay penguins. But necrophiliac penguins? Sorry, Monty, that’s not real love, but it is real penguin life. Just don’t tell John Lewis...more

Penguin perverts...soon to be declared a "distinct population".