Two blue penguins just couldn’t stay away from a New Zealand sushi store. The birds waddled 660 feet to nest there—even after a police escort back to the ocean.
This week, Wellington, NZ, police got a call about a grumpy bird under a parked car. They managed to release it back into the ocean.
Police responded to more calls and found two penguins huddled under the Sushi Bi shop. They guided them to the ocean. But within hours, the two fishy birds were underneath the shop again.
Store co-owner Long Lin joked he had no idea that word of his tasty raw fish had reached the subaquatic community.
Police say the “waddling vagrants” probably thought they’d found a snug burrow underneath the shop near the capital’s busy train station—and wouldn’t have noticed the savory feast above them.
Jack Mace, an operations manager for the Department of Conservation, says the birds ventured “within penguin commuting distance of the harbor, and they thought they’d found a nice spot.”
Lin was tidying up the storage room when he heard a sound from near the water tank. He walked outside and peered underneath the store. “I was panicked,” Lin says. “I didn’t know what to do.”
He called authorities. Meanwhile, the penguins waddled out. He grabbed them one by one and put them inside his store. One pecked him several times, leaving welts on his chest.
Inside the store, the penguins strutted around. Worker Shawnee Kim tried offering them fresh salmon, but they didn’t seem interested.
Eventually, rangers removed the birds from under the store’s freezer and put them in a special nesting box on the harbor.
The penguins haven’t been seen since. Mace hopes they’ve ventured out to sea. . . . But maybe they’ll be back for the California roll.
(In this July 15, 2019, image made from a video, a man holds a penguin near a sushi shop in Wellington, New Zealand. A pair of "vagrant" blue penguins have been forcibly removed after waddling into a New Zealand sushi shop and refusing to leave. (TVNZ via AP)
