Rockhopper Penguins’ Athleticism Makes Them the Daredevils of the Animal World. Will a Warming Climate Slow Them Down?

A visit to the Falkland Islands, where the fearless seabirds navigate the rugged topography with tenacious spunk, shows the new challenges they face

By

Cheryl Katz

Photographs by Chris Linder

January/February 2026

On a rocky ledge over the coast of an island in the far south Atlantic Ocean, a young penguin peers nervously at the chasm ahead. Her bushy yellow eyebrows waggle as she tilts her head one way, then another, scouting the route home to her nest high above. This next step will be a doozy. To reach the ledge on the other side, she’ll have to make a gravity-defying leap more than twice her diminutive height. Her wet feathers shimmer in the setting sun as she musters her courage. “You can do it,” Petra Quillfeldt coaxes the little penguin. “You’re a rockhopper!”

The coach’s confidence is well founded. Quillfeldt, a seabird ecologist from Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany, has been visiting this southern rockhopper colony in the Falkland Islands for nearly 20 years, studying how the penguins, with their piston-like bodies, are being affected by climate and ocean conditions. As if buoyed by the pep talk, the hesitant bird cocks her flightless wings. Her powerful pink feet push off the rock with tremendous force. She catapults across the gap and sticks the landing with the clasp of strong, gripping claws. After a beat to shake her feathers and toss us a backward glance, she hops off to join her colony-mates bounding up the steep hill.

Penguins, those shambling stars of nature films, are some of the world’s most familiar and beloved birds. We’re inspired by their quiet stoicism and amused by their clumsy, waddling gait. But southern rockhoppers—little balls of muscle with outsize personalities—are the badasses of the penguin world. Roughly the size of a pet rabbit, rockhoppers are the smallest penguins to ply the cold, rough waters north of Antarctica. With their bright ruby eyes, whimsical gold crests and spiky black crowns, they sport an adorable, pixie-punk look. Rockhoppers surf the gnarliest breaks, fight with birds many times their size and pick constant noisy squabbles with their neighbors. Their full-throttle lifestyle makes them favorites among people who live and work in the Falklands, a Connecticut-size cluster of around 780 islands roughly 400 miles east of the southern coast of South America. “They’ve got attitude. They’re always doing something,” says Adrian Lowe, a farmer who has three rockhopper colonies on his sheep pasture near Stanley, the Falklands’ capital. “They’re tough.”

At Quillfeldt’s study colony on New Island, an eight-mile-long crescent near the archipelago’s western edge, lines of pint-size commuters in black-and-white suits snake up a winding gully. It’s mid-December, the end of a long austral summer day, and these rockhoppers have been fishing since dawn, 14 hours ago. “And then they have to go home and feed the chicks!” Quillfeldt notes wryly.

To get back to their nests, microchipped penguins must pass through a radio-frequency gateway at the colony’s entrance, which logs their comings and goings. The birds bouncing past us now are nearly all mothers, Quillfeldt tells me. One way that rockhoppers have adapted to their food-limited, energy-demanding environment is that males stay in the colony guarding the chicks and don’t eat for roughly a month while chicks are with them full-time. Only females forage while the chicks are in the nest. Their flexible stomach physiology makes them essentially refrigerators for the day’s catch of krill and small fish. They digest some of the prey they swallow, but as they head back to land their digestion shuts down and their stomach cools—keeping the food fresh for hungry chicks. I watch these intrepid mamas ride the churning surf below, porpoising over surging waves to shore, then blasting belly-first onto jagged, seaweed-slicked rocks. Some land, pop up on their feet and make a mad dash out of the way of the next wave. Most, however, wipe out and get swept back to sea. They’ll have to try and try again. 

Rockhoppers’ penchant for colonies high over perilous landings separates them from the other penguin species that call the Falklands home: Magellanics, kings, macaronis and gentoos. Those other penguins usually build their colonies on soft, level ground with easy access to the water, says Juan Masello, a behavioral ecologist who is also Quillfeldt’s husband. But not rockhoppers. “They go for the worst,” he says. 

Indeed, according to Sarah Crofts, a seabird biologist who has worked with Falklands bird life for nearly two decades, these daredevils don’t even seem to consider the prospect of failure. “They only say, ‘We’ll give it go. We’ll try and scale this huge cliff to get to the colony. Or we’ll fight an albatross to defend our nest.’ It’s just the way they’re built: determined.”

Like most penguins today, however, these tough little birds are facing some big problems. Rockhoppers, members of the crested penguin (Eudyptes) genus, have recently been divided into three species: southern (also sometimes called western), northern (also known as Moseley’s), and eastern. More than half of the world’s rockhoppers are southern rockhoppers, which breed primarily in the subpolar Falklands and along the southern coast of South America. Colonies of the considerably less populous northern rockhoppers are found mainly on temperate South Atlantic islands, much farther north, while eastern rockhoppers have their range around New Zealand and the southern Indian Ocean. Populations of all three species have plummeted in recent years. Southern rockhoppers, believed to have once numbered in the several millions worldwide, fell to an estimated 850,000 breeding pairs in a 2010 census and were classified as “vulnerable” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species in 2020. The species’ decline is especially concerning in the Falklands, where more than a third of all southern rockhoppers are born. Once-teeming colonies here have become noticeably sparse. Scientists estimate that some 1.5 million rockhopper couples raised chicks across the archipelago in the 1930s. By 1996, that number had dropped to fewer than 300,000. 

Last century’s precipitous plunge of rockhoppers in the Falklands appears to have tapered, for now. With a life span of 10 to 15 years, the species can withstand the occasional disaster and rebuild the population over time. But as colonies here in the Falklands struggle to recover, a string of catastrophes during recent breeding seasons has repeatedly knocked them back down. In the early 2000s, for instance, tens of thousands of rockhoppers and other penguins died from consuming prey poisoned by a toxic algal bloom. Colonies have also been clobbered by food shortages that caused mass starvation of adults.

What’s more, chick survival in the Falklands has slumped for the past three decades. Changing weather is unleashing unseasonably intense storms, killing downy chicks that haven’t yet grown their warm, waterproof feathers. Predation is also taking a toll. Rockhoppers generally mate for life and raise one or occasionally two chicks per season. Chicks, slow to mature, don’t breed until they’re around 4 years old. (Penguins spend most of their lives at sea and only come onto land to breed.) These days, however, too few chicks live to fledge at the end of most seasons to help boost the numbers when they return as adults.

Outside Quillfeldt’s study colony, it’s getting dark, and rush hour has slowed to a trickle. As we head back to the lab, from the colony behind us, the enthusiastic brays of reuniting couples, the insistent peeps of hungry chicks and the screeching spats between neighbors follow us, growing louder as it gets later.

The next evening, I struggle to keep up with Quillfeldt and Masello as they march through dense tussac grass on their way back to the New Island study colony. The stiff native grass is taller than I am, and I feel a moment of panic when it totally enfolds me. Then I spot the long pole strapped to Masello’s backpack. He’ll use it to snare six rockhoppers that have pencil-case-size black boxes taped to their backs. The boxes, which he and Quillfeldt attached three days earlier, contain GPS data loggers that record locations. Some also track diving and other movements. Now the researchers will peel off the equipment and upload the birds’ foraging tracks. The information will give the scientists a critical read on ocean conditions, revealed by the birds’ responses.

The Falklands riveted worldwide attention in 1982, when Argentina and the United Kingdom fought a brief but brutal war for control over this remote, isolated smattering of islands. Today, the archipelago and its 3,500 or so human residents are administered by the U.K. as a self-governing British overseas territory. New Island, however, was named by American whalers who landed there in the late 1700s. The island went on to host more than a century of commercial slaughter of seals, whales and other wildlife—including an 1800s operation that rendered rockhoppers for oil—and an early 1900s whaling station. In 1813, New Island was the scene of an infamous sabotage when a group of castaways rescued by American sea captain Charles H. Barnard stole his ship and left the Good Samaritan and his crew marooned. More recently, like much of the Falklands, New Island was used to farm sheep. For decades, thousands of livestock roamed the island, leaving a trampled landscape in their wake. 

Mensun Bound, a fifth-generation British Falkland Islander, spent his boyhood summers on New Island in the late 1950s and 1960s, working for his uncle, John Davis, known as “Cracker Jack,” who was then the island’s owner. Over tea and Christmas cake in his Stanley summer home, Bound tells me about helping cut down tussac and building roads and fences as part of his uncle’s quest to transform the land. His uncle had a ruthless view of nature, Bound recalls. “Anything that moved was killed, pretty much, except for the sheep.”

Such practices capped centuries of habitat damage for the island’s numerous species of seabirds. Grass-clearing, underway since the whalers burned huge swaths, exposed nests to the elements and predators. Lush peat beds eroded down to bare rock. Cats, rabbits and other imported animals and plants crowded out natives. Today, in a karmic U-turn, New Island is a National Nature Reserve. The turnabout began in the 1970s, when the British conservationist Ian Strange bought the island from Davis’ family, removed the sheep and started restoring the native environment. The nongovernmental organization Falklands Conservation now owns the island and continues its restoration, with hopes of removing the island’s invasive rabbits if it can secure the funds. The island today is largely uninhabited save for visiting scientists, day-tripping cruise passengers and a pair of wardens who supervise a small seasonal tourist operation.

An old stone farmhouse stands along the path to the rockhopper colony about half a mile away. The path ends in this rebounding grassland at the island’s crest, where we follow our ears to the raucous colony on the other side. We emerge at the edge of a field in the sloping headland, stamped by countless pink feet over hundreds of years. 

The colony pulses with black-and-white motion—penguins bouncing up and down rock tiers, swirling around nests, greeting, preening, cuddling, fighting. Around 5,300 rockhopper couples are breeding at this particular colony this year, Quillfeldt estimates. That number has ranged from some 4,000 to 12,000 in recent years. Fluffy gray chicks, around 3 weeks old, cling to their fathers’ bellies. Most nests hold a single chick, a few have twins, and all of the babies have their bills wide open for their returning mothers to regurgitate dinner. 

Quillfeldt and I crouch in the tall grass at the colony’s edge as Masello wades into the fray. Treading gingerly over the poop-streaked ground, he approaches one of the females, snags her feet, scoops her up and carries her back to us. “Poor birdie,” Quillfeldt says softly to the squirming penguin. The scientists gently remove the bird’s kit, weigh her and mark her white belly with a stripe so she won’t be recruited again. The activity draws the attention of curious colony-mates, which come over to watch. “You can be my next volunteer,” Masello tells one especially nosy neighbor that tries to peer over his arm as he works. The crowd grows as the released penguin hops back to her nest and Masello wades into the colony again.

Later, in the scientists’ field station—a two-story wooden building in New Island’s tiny settlement, decorated with artwork by previous researchers—we crowd around a computer screen, waiting for the foraging females’ data to assemble onto a map. Quillfeldt looks concerned as the tracks appear. Rather than foraging in the open ocean, which in good years swarms with energy-rich crustaceans, the birds are foraging mainly between islands, where they’re likely catching tiny critters called lobster krill that are harder to digest. That means the colony’s food scenario this year is “probably suboptimal,” Quillfeldt says.

The scientists will deploy the penguin loggers again during the month they spend on New Island. But the data so far jibes with Quillfeldt’s observations about the colony’s food supply. “Two things when we arrived caught my attention,” she tells me. “One is that there are very few nests with two chicks. In other years, we have quite a few.” This observation relates to southern rockhoppers’ unusual reproduction strategy, another adaptation to their unforgiving environment. Females lay two eggs at separate times—first a small “A” egg, followed by a larger “B” egg several days later. In contrast to most other birds, rockhoppers’ second egg hatches up to three days earlier than the first. That head start gives “B” chicks a crucial—and generally lethal—advantage over smaller siblings when the food supply is limited, as this year’s appears to be. It’s a harsh practicality, allowing parents to focus on their most viable chick, while providing a backup, just in case. And when food is abundant, both chicks can survive, helping the population rebound. 

Quillfeldt also notes that mothers are losing more weight than usual while foraging this year, which means they’re working harder to provide for their chicks. “They are OK,” she says, “but it’s not a luxury year.” 

Seabirds in the Falkland Islands rely on cold, nutrient-rich water flowing north from Antarctica to deliver food to colonies along the coasts. Some years, however, the current weakens, and warm, nutrient-poor subtropical water pushes south, resulting in spartan provisions. Though rockhoppers, like most seabirds, have always grappled with vacillating ocean conditions, the Falkland Islands lie just north of the Southern Ocean—one of the planet’s fastest-warming ocean basins. Around half or more of the atmosphere’s excess heat our oceans have soaked up since 2005 is stored in these Antarctic and sub-Antarctic waters—dialing up wind speeds, intensifying weather and disturbing ocean circulation across the region. 

Despite their bravado, rockhoppers are highly sensitive to change. Research by Quillfeldt, Masello and their colleagues shows that even a slight increase in sea temperature can disrupt the birds’ food supply and lower chick and adult survival. And moving south to cooler waters isn’t an option. Like many penguins, southern rockhoppers nest only on islands, and the next islands south of the Falklands are across a long, rough stretch of the Southern Ocean. The constant westerly winds there would push the little penguins east to the icy coasts of Antarctica, Quillfeldt says. There’s no land there where they can build new colonies.

I think of the vast, empty southern expanse as I head south in a small twin-engine airplane. I’m in a Falklands government-operated air taxi, the main way to travel between most of the few dozen small settlements scattered across the archipelago. We’re en route to Sea Lion Island, the largest of a five-island group and the Falklands’ southernmost inhabited outpost. Here, clinging to wind-beaten headlands over treacherous seas, are what biologist Crofts calls the “most extreme” southern rockhopper nesting sites of all.

The plane lands on a grass strip near the nature lodge that Crofts runs with her partner, Micky Reeves. A rutted track meanders to Rockhopper Point. In her former job monitoring seabirds for Falklands Conservation, Crofts visited rockhopper colonies throughout the Falklands and beyond. I can see what she means about the extreme nature of this one. Rockhoppers cluster on the exposed landscape, a monochrome of bare rocks and guano. A white snowy sheathbill scavenges a chick’s corpse. Thudding waves spray seawater from the ocean a hundred feet below, where tiny black-and-white figures swirl around battering rocks. Those that have already conquered the death-defying landing are leaping and clawing their way back up the vertical path to the colony. “I don’t know what the first rockhopper was thinking when he said, ‘Yeah, I can get up there,’” Crofts muses. “They’re like these adrenaline junkies. Really hardcore.”

But Sea Lion’s rockhoppers have also suffered recent breeding disasters. Storms mowed down chicks in the 2010 to 2011 season, and again in 2013 to 2014, 2020 to 2021, and 2021 to 2022. The mass starvation that swept the archipelago in 2016 wiped out many of the island’s adults. The 2020 storms also drove away the imperial cormorants that normally nest alongside rockhoppers and help shield each other’s youngsters from predators. The cormorant population never returned. Southern giant petrels devastated rockhopper chick crops after that.

So Crofts has been outfitting the colony with some creative art and architecture. The results are an amusing sight. Packs of young rockhoppers mill around stone slab structures that look like miniature “Flintstones” houses. They’re chaperoned by a squadron of stone cormorant sculptures watching silently. Crofts began building the “bunkers” in 2022, after the back-to-back calamities sparked the idea to give chicks a place to hide from future tempests and marauders. The decoy cormorants—cement casts made from a taxidermist’s model—were placed in hopes of luring real ones back to the colony. 

The chicks are now around 4 weeks old and are crèching—a sort of penguin version of middle school. Over the next several weeks, they’ll spend more and more time away from their parents, hanging out in groups, practicing moves and putting on attitude. They’ll shed their baby fluff and grow grayish, water-resistant juvenile feathers, getting ready to continue their journey to adulthood in the sea. As with humans, the transition from nestling to fledgling is one of the most vulnerable stages of a chick’s life. 

Crofts’ efforts seem to be helping. The number of chicks that survive to fledge on Sea Lion Island has steadily risen—from 86 in 2022, before the shelters were installed, to 260 this year. The cormorants had a slower start. Despite the decoys being “beautifully painted by Sarah” in realistic black and white, Reeves says, the living cormorants continued to steer clear. “Then this winter, there must have been quite a big storm, so they all got washed around and messed up a bit,” he goes on, with a grin. The weather-beaten decoys turned greige, spattered with guano. “And the cormorants started breeding there again!”

Crofts aims to get as many of the colony’s rockhopper chicks fledged as possible, so they’ll return as adults to help rebuild the area’s population from the current 400-some breeding pairs to a more sustainable level of around 500. She and Reeves are also trying to re-establish the native tussac grass, which, as in much of the Falklands, was stripped during the island’s former days as a farm. The resort hosts a volunteer planting weekend every year. 

Photos from the 1930s show these cliffs covered with rockhoppers, Crofts tells me. “It’s that shift to living in our world now that they’re obviously struggling with.” It may be impossible to stop the changes sweeping their ocean habitat, she adds. “But to help them on land, at the breeding sites, is something we can actually do.”

In the short sub-Antarctic summer, chicks must grow up fast. I can see them change day by day. The shy nestlings clinging to their fathers two weeks ago have nearly doubled in size. Now-bold 5-week-olds bounce around the colony like fuzzy basketballs. Soon, at the ripe age of around 10 weeks, they’ll be off to sea.

The chicks appear robust, but food shortage effects are apparent to the researchers. “We’ve seen them fatter,” Quillfeldt tells me. “Some years they look like they’re going to burst.” Still, she thinks they’re doing OK. The 2024 to 2025 breeding season on New Island turned out to be average, she’ll tell me later, after the chicks have fledged. Most of the single chicks survived. The adults, too, made it through the season without incident. Crofts reports a similar outcome on Sea Lion Island.

In the short term, rockhoppers in the Falkland Islands appear to be holding their own. “As long as there are no other harmful events in between, the breeding success itself would be OK,” Quillfeldt says of the New Island colony. But critical colonies here remain too small and produce too few new breeders to buffer the population from future catastrophes. The scenario is similar throughout the southern rockhopper’s range. And catastrophes are almost certain to come.

Rockhoppers already push their bodies to the limit. I think of the young rockhopper leaping over a daunting chasm. The moms up at sunrise, hurling themselves into washing-machine seas. The half-grown chicks trying out daredevil acrobatics. I ask the scientists: Can rockhoppers’ moxie be an asset to their survival? “Personality can be very important,” Quillfeldt tells me. Curiosity and boldness can spur seabirds to find ways to adapt, such as trying different foods and scouting out new breeding sites. And character can shape genetics through natural selection, Masello adds, recalling a rockhopper that bit and scratched him during sensor deployment the other day. “If I were a predator that had a first encounter with that one, I would leave that one in peace and go for another one,” he says. 

On my last day on New Island, after dinner, we head back to the colony in search of guano. We tail rockhoppers, waiting for them to produce samples for diet analysis. When they deliver, Quillfeldt quickly scrapes up the gooey output and drops it into a vial Masello has ready. The little penguins cock their heads and look us directly in the eye, as if wondering what’s up with these crazy giant creatures.

Down at the landing, a gentoo and a Magellanic penguin appear to have washed up at the wrong place. They stare at the rockhoppers’ airborne maneuvers, crane their necks to scrutinize the powerful pink feet. The spectators try to leap. But they fail to get off the ground. With a sad backward glance at the bouncing rockhoppers, the other penguins give up and waddle back down to the sea. 

This story was made possible with assistance from Falklands Conservation incorporating New Island Conservation Trust.