It is not every day you wake up to the sound of pots and pans crashing on the kitchen floor. It’s even more peculiar when the culprit is a lost Humboldt penguin.
Fearing an intruder had entered to rob their home, a family in the northern Peruvian town of Chimbote jumped out of bed to find the unexpected — a medium-sized penguin wandering around on the hunt for food.
How he ended up there remains a mystery. But there are theories.
One is that barking dogs forced the stubby bird to seek refuge in the family’s home.
“We don’t know how he got there, but there were reports of some dogs in a patio barking and acting like they were going to attack,” Douglas Calderon Morrillas, a dipatcher at the town’s local police station told CNN.
However Alberto Rios, a dispatcher at another local police station, offers a different story.
He claims to have spotted the lost penguin in the neighborhood.
Rios who works at the Nuevo Chimbote police station told CNN that residents there love animals and were alarmed when they saw the penguin shuffling around in the streets.
“This isn’t the first penguin we’ve rescued,” he added. “It’s the third.”
Rios theorizes that local fishermen catch them in their nets and try to keep them as pets.
Local authorities eventually rescued the penguin and escorted him in a police car to a lagoon at a zoo where, Rios notes, there are other penguins for him to play with.
