Top NZ surgeon operates on wayward penguin

A leading gastroenterologist has helped remove sand, stones and other debris from the animal's gut.

ONE OF NEW ZEALAND'S top surgeons has been enlisted to operate on an ailing emperor penguin found on a beach near Wellington, some 3000 km from its Antarctic home.

More used to dealing with sick humans than poorly penguins, surgeon Dr John Wyeth performed a delicate two-hour operation on the bird, nicknamed Happy Feet, which has suffered declining health since it appeared last week.

Assisted by a six-person medical team, John performed an endoscopy to remove twigs, stones and sand which had been clogging the penguin's gut, feeding a tiny camera down its throat then looping a line around the debris.

"It (was) a memorable experience," says John, the head of gastroenterology at Wellington Hospital and a past president of the New Zealand Society of Gastroenterology. "I wasn't familiar with the anatomy ... if I did a similar procedure in a human it would take me 10 minutes."

Eating sand

Only the second emperor penguin ever recorded in New Zealand, Happy Feet was taken to Wellington Zoo last Friday after it began eating sand in a bid to cool down. Emperor penguins in the Antarctic eat snow when they get too hot.

The zoo's veterinary manager Lisa Argilla says the penguin, thought to be a young male, appeared to have come through the surgery intact, although she added: "He's still not out of the woods."

Lisa says the bird, which is used to sub-zero climes, was being kept in an air-conditioned room carpeted with crushed ice to cool it in the relative warmth of New Zealand, where temperatures are currently around 10 degrees Celsius.

Wildlife experts have ruled out flying the penguin back to Antarctica right now as the frozen continent is in the midst of winter and engulfed by 24-hour darkness. If the penguin can be nursed back to health, the best option may be releasing it into sub-Antarctic waters south of New Zealand in the hope that it will swim home. Another option is for it to get a life home on a Russian icebreaker in the summer.

Mystery appearance

But the penguin is underweight following its long swim north and has intestinal trauma, Lisa says, meaning it is not yet ready to be released into the wild. "It's hard to say how long it would take, but it would probably be a few months," she told reporters.

Lisa says that staff at the zoo have become attached to the bird and are heartened by the level of international interest in its fate. "It's really awesome to see that we've pretty much got the world behind us - a little bit of pressure but we're doing our best," she says.

John, who volunteered to operate on the penguin after learning about its plight, rejected suggestions that if it could not survive in New Zealand then nature should be left to take its course. "I think the important thing in this world is humanity and caring, and if we don't show that, it doesn't reflect very well on our society," he says.

The emperor is the largest penguin species and can grow over a metre in height. The reason for Happy Feet's appearance in New Zealand remains a mystery, although experts say emperor penguins take to the open sea during the Antarctic summer and this one may have simply wandered off course.

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