One of New Zealand’s top surgeons was enlisted yesterday to operate on an ailing emperor penguin found on a beach near Wellington, 3,000km from its Antarctic home.
More used to dealing with sick humans than poorly penguins, surgeon 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, Wyeth performed an endoscopy to remove twigs, stones and sand that 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,” said Wyeth, the head of gastroenterology at Wellington Hospital and a former 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.”
Only the second emperor penguin ever recorded in New Zealand, Happy Feet was taken to Wellington Zoo on 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 said 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.”
She said the bird, which is used 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 about 10?C.
Wildlife experts have ruled out flying the penguin back to Antarctica as the frozen continent is in the midst of winter and engulfed by 24-hour darkness.
Argilla said that if it could be nursed back to health, the best option may be releasing Happy Feet into sub-Antarctic waters south of New Zealand in the hope that it will swim home.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion