Every spring, gentoo penguins build nests out of small stones. A male penguin will search for the very best pebble and present it to the female he likes. If she accepts it, they start building a home together. It is called pebbling, and it is basically a penguin proposal.
At Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland, the keepers came up with a lovely way to help.
They teamed up with the Edinburgh Children’s Hospital Charity, which supports young patients at the Royal Hospital for Children and Young People. The children in hospital, some of them very sick, were given pebbles and paint.
They painted more than 1,000 of them.
There were flowers, rainbows, hearts and smiley faces. There were superheroes like Spider-Man and the colours of Scottish football teams. Every pebble was different, and every one was made by a child who could not go outside to play.
Then the keepers loaded the pebbles into a big green wheelbarrow and tipped them out into the penguin enclosure.
The penguins came waddling over straight away. They poked at the colourful stones, picked them up in their beaks and carried them off to their nests, one at a time. Some of them seemed to be very picky about which pebble was good enough.
Back at the hospital, the children could watch it all happen on the zoo’s live Penguin Cam.
One of the keepers said she always gets emotional when the pebbles go in. It is easy to see why.
For a few weeks, children who were stuck in hospital beds got to help penguins build their homes. And somewhere in Edinburgh, a penguin is sitting on a nest decorated by a child who needed a little bit of joy.
Which pebble would you have painted for the penguins? Tell us in the comments.
