The Penguin Knitters

The Penguin Knitters

When Pat Gallup heard on the radio last year that tiny fairy penguins were desperately in need of wool sweaters to help them survive the cold after an oil spill off the southern tip of Australia, she surveyed her stash of leftover yarn bits and went next door to ask a neighbor if she’d like to knit sweaters for the birds. Both women loved to knit, and penguin sweaters seemed a good, if unusual, way to use up their leftover odds and ends of wool. Wool sweaters were needed because oil destroys the insulating ability of penquin feathers, and wool insulates even when wet.

Gallup passed the idea along to members of the North Olympic Shuttle and Spindle Guild and to friends at a knitting shop, Banana Belt Yarns. Soon a knitting brigade had formed in the town of Sequim, Wash., (pop. 4,334) with women turning out hundreds of little brightly colored wool sweaters for the 12-inch-tall birds.

The yarn store served as a collection point for leftover wool, and co-owners Sandy Duncan and Claire Haycox distributed more than 100 copies of the fairy-penguin sweater patterns to knitters from far and wide who requested them. “We were in full-blown penguin fever,” Duncan says. “People really liked the idea of helping an endangered species.”

The knitters’ efforts on behalf of the penguins did not go unnoticed. Within days, Seattle television stations and The Associated Press had picked up the story, and the Sequim knitters were immortalized in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, People magazine, and in an Australian public television documentary.

“We never thought it was going to take off like it did,” Gallup says.

“It’s something you can do in a relatively short time, and it doesn’t take a lot of money,” says Spindle Guild member Sandy Woodward.

The doll-clothes-size wool sweaters, measuring about 4-by-9 inches, are so creatively decorated that it’s hard to keep in mind that the purpose they serve is anything but festive.

Oil spills are Public Enemy No. 1 for the world’s smallest penguins. When they swim through it, the natural oil in their bluish-gray feathers is destroyed and their insulation is compromised. Wool sweaters keep the penguins warm while they recuperate enough to withstand the rigors of having the bunker oil hand-washed off them with a mild detergent. The sweaters also keep the birds from preening their feathers and ingesting the toxic oil.

Once they are cleaned and brought back to health by wildlife rehabilitation experts, they are outfitted with new sweaters that keep them warm until the natural oil returns to their feathers. In the meantime, because the sweaters are 100 percent wool, salty seawater rots them away so the penguins can swim free of them without requiring further handling.

The need for sweaters for the fairy penguins endangered by the oil spill off the southern tip of Australia is over for now. All but a few of the oil-drenched penguins survived, thanks to the efforts of enthusiastic knitters like those in Sequim, Wash. But, because spills occur on a regular basis off the coasts of Australia, the Tasmanian Conservation Trust is collecting fairy-penguin sweaters for the next disaster.

They currently are storing more than 3,000 penguin sweaters, which have been donated by knitters from as far afield as Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Laurel Holliday is a frequent contributor to American Profile.

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