Professor Penguin - Lloyd Spencer Davis

The secret lives of penguins revealed by world expert in fascinating new book

Random House

17 October 2014

RRP $39.99

Also available as an ebook

Meet ‘Bill Bryson in Antarctica’ in this engaging book by one of the world’s authorities on penguins. Part memoir, partly the research of a field biologist, Professor Penguin could be called ‘How Penguins Shaped My Life’. 
Based on journals kept during Davis’s years of working with penguins in the wild, the story takes readers to remote locations: Antarctica, the Galapagos, the deserts of Chile and Peru, the Falkland Islands, the wild coasts of Argentina and South Africa, and New Zealand.

Davis reveals that these box-office favourites are not the cute ‘mate for life’ animals we’ve been led to believe. He also reveals that penguins are a lot like humans — sometimes disturbingly so — when it comes to their basic needs: sex, food, shelter, marriage, family and travel.

Over the years that Davis studies penguins, he realises that they are far more complex and nuanced than he imagines at his first encounter. ‘They really don’t deserve to be seen as so black and white.’ He expertly marries scientific knowledge with his own anecdotes — told with humour, hard-earned knowledge and insight. Lloyd Spencer Davis also covers how our knowledge about penguins has been advanced by other ‘professor penguins’ — by including a story on each.

Implicit throughout is Davis’s philosophy – the more we learn about the natural world, and specifically penguins, the more we learn about ourselves. And he asks: Is the isolation of Antarctica sufficient to protect penguins from us?

Illustrated with photographs from the author’s fascinating archive spanning 35 years of research, Professor Penguin provides an unprecedented, in-depth look at the lives and behaviour of these unique creatures. Brilliantly written, engaging and humorous, it will win over anyone who also loves to read Bill Bryson.

About the author

Lloyd Spencer Davis fits easily into the category of creative non-fiction writing. He received the PEN (NZ) Best First Book Award for Non-fiction for Penguin: A Season in the Life of the Adelie Penguin, the story of Antarctica as seen through the eyes of a penguin. His next book, The Plight of the Penguin, won Book of the Year at the 2002 NZ Post Children’s Book Awards, as well as winning the non-fiction category at the same awards.

He received a CLL Writer’s Award — New Zealand’s most significant award for the support of nonfiction — for Looking for Darwin, which also won the Runner’s Up Award as the New Zealand Travel Book of the Year, 2008

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His other publications include Smithsonian Q&A Penguins, commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution, and Penguins of New Zealand (with photographs by Rod Morris). With Claudia Babirat he wrote the textbook The Business of Documentary Filmmaking.

In addition, Davis has been a director and scriptwriter of natural history documentaries for over 20 years. His internationally award-winning films include Eating like a Gannet, Under Galapagos, Meet the Real Penguins and, with Wiebke Finkler, a documentary on Shona Dunlop MacTavish, Wind Dancer.

Davis attended Victoria University of Wellington and Canterbury University before gaining a PhD at the University of Alberta in Canada, as Commonwealth Scholar. He currently holds the Stuart Chair in Science Communication at the University of Otago where, among other things, he teaches creative nonfiction writing. He has been a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, an Anzac Fellowship and a Prince and Princess of Wales Science Award.

Footnote: Davis attended Napier Boys High School before his university days where The Bookman (then a bookseller in Napier) knew him as a keen debater and prize-winning student.

Right - Back cover