Taiwan was on tenterhooks yesterday as it waited to see if a penguin egg, already five days overdue, would hatch.
Up to 60,000 people have queued each Sunday for a glimpse of the four king penguins at the Taipei Zoo in Mucha since they were imported from Japan in September.
The prospect of a fifth, and the island's first new-born penguin, has caused a further frenzy with well-wishers leaving hundreds of prayer notes and the media providing a daily update of the egg's progress.
Despite the delay, Wang Chin-yuan, the zoo official in charge of the penguin house, remained optimistic. "The father penguin was very active in defending its egg over the past two days. It would utter a sound of threat whenever we walked by," he said.
"This, in a sense, showed it was confident in the egg," he said.
Visitors to the zoo were forced last year to wait in kilometer-long lines for up to five hours in order to see two koala bears for just 20 seconds at a time.
The zoo estimates that the koalas attracted up to a million extra visitors over the year.
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