Tokyo, 15 September, /AJMEDIA/
Himakajima is an island in Aichi Prefecture’s Mikawa Bay, south of Nagoya, with a population of less than 2,000 people. During the recently concluded summer vacation period, a temporary penguin exhibit was set up on one of the island’s beaches, and everything seems to have gone well until the last day of the event.
On August 25, as the organizers were taking down the installation, they wanted to let the penguins cool off by taking a swim in the ocean while everything was being packed up. Unfortunately, while a containment net had been put in place to keep the animals from swimming out to the open sea, one of them, a 6-year-old cape penguin named Pen-chan, somehow slipped through the enclosure.
Penguins, of course, are not native to Japan, and Penters, the organization that organized the event, was particularly worried about Pen-chan, since she was born and raised in captivity, and hasn’t ever had to hunt for food in the wild. Unfortunately, a search of the island’s coastlines failed to find the animal, and an approaching typhoon prevented the use of boats to expand the search to the surrounding seas.
There was a brief glimmer of hope, though, when Pen-chan was spotted at a different island, Shinojima, to the south of Himakajima.
