On 23 November 2020, four Magellanic penguins from Chicago's Shedd Aquarium spent part of a day at Soldier Field, the stadium shared by the Chicago Bears and the Chicago Fire. They ran out through the players' tunnel, waddled over the natural grass and poked around the locker rooms, with several of their keepers walking alongside. The aquarium was closed to visitors at the time because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and staff were using short outings like this one to keep the birds active and curious.
The clip the aquarium posted went viral almost immediately, partly because it arrived at a gloomy moment of the pandemic and partly because there is something irresistible about a penguin trotting across a professional football pitch. Below is what actually happened, who the penguins were, and why zoos and aquariums organise trips like this at all.
What happened at Soldier Field
Soldier Field sits on Chicago's Near South Side, a short walk from the Shedd along the Lake Michigan shore. Opened in 1924 and dedicated that year as Grant Park Stadium, it seats about 62,500 people for American football. In 2020 it was home to the NFL's Chicago Bears and to Chicago Fire FC, which had just returned there for its Major League Soccer season.
On the day of the visit the field was marked out for a Fire soccer match, not for football. According to the aquarium's press release, the penguins came out of a tunnel onto the pitch, felt grass under their feet for the first time, and then went to explore the locker rooms. There were no crowds and no game; the birds had the place to themselves, apart from their handlers and a photographer.
The Shedd shared the outing on Twitter with a playful post tagging its new "neighbour" and both home teams:
They're waddling down the field, and...goooalll! ⚽🐧🏈
— Shedd Aquarium (@shedd_aquarium) November 23, 2020
Just in time for the height of fall football season, Da Penguins visited our neighbor and the home of Da @ChicagoBears and @ChicagoFire, @SoldierField! pic.twitter.com/SRtyTYm3nk
"Da Penguins" is a nod to the famous "Da Bears" sketches from Saturday Night Live, a running joke that Chicagoans have embraced for decades.
Meet the four penguins
The travelling party was made up of four birds. Izzy and Darwin are a bonded pair and were already seasoned day-trippers: earlier in 2020 they had visited the Field Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, outings that also drew a lot of attention online. Tombo and Charlotte joined them for the stadium trip.
All four are Magellanic penguins, a medium-sized species that stands roughly 61 to 76 centimetres tall and weighs between about 2.7 and 6.5 kilograms. Males are a little larger than females. In the wild they can live to around 25 years, and in human care sometimes longer.
The species is named after Ferdinand Magellan, whose expedition recorded the birds in 1520 while sailing along the coast of South America. Today Magellanic penguins breed along the Patagonian coasts of Argentina and Chile and on the Falkland Islands. One of the biggest colonies is at Punta Tombo in Argentina, and some birds swim north as far as Brazil and Uruguay outside the breeding season.
Why aquariums take penguins on field trips
To a visitor a stadium tour looks like a stunt, and the publicity value is obvious. But the aquarium framed it as part of its animal welfare work, and that reasoning is worth taking seriously. In a statement quoted by reporters, the Shedd said that variety matters for the birds' welfare, so that, as in the wild, "no two days are ever the same."
Zoos call this kind of work environmental enrichment. The idea is that animals in human care do better when they get chances to use their natural behaviours: exploring, problem-solving, foraging and moving over different surfaces. For penguins, enrichment can include new objects in the habitat, changes to feeding routines, swimming challenges and, at some institutions, supervised walks outside their usual space.
The Shedd described the outings as part of a broader welfare plan that also includes daily exercise. During the 2020 closure there was an extra reason for them: with no visitors in the building, the animals were missing a large part of the everyday noise and activity they were used to. Staff at several aquariums around the world reported that some animals seemed to notice when the crowds disappeared.
A field trip is not a free-for-all, though. The birds are accompanied by trained caretakers, kept away from hazards and moved in a controlled way. They are also not wandering into the city by themselves, which is an important difference from the lockdown stories of wild animals strolling through empty streets.
A few facts about Magellanic penguin life
Magellanic penguins nest in burrows or under bushes, which sets them apart from the ice-and-snow image many people have of penguins. A pair usually lays two eggs, and both parents take turns incubating them for about 39 to 42 days before sharing the work of feeding the chicks.
They are often described as mating "for life". The more careful way to put it is that pairs frequently reunite year after year. The male typically returns to the burrow he used the previous season, and the female finds him there. Izzy and Darwin's status as a bonded pair fits that pattern well.
At sea they hunt small fish, squid and krill, usually diving to depths of about 20 to 50 metres. The IUCN currently lists the species as Least Concern, but its population is considered to be decreasing, with threats including oil pollution, fishing pressure and changes in prey linked to warming oceans.
What the viral story got slightly wrong
Some versions of this story that spread in 2020 described Soldier Field as the home of a baseball team. It isn't: the Bears play American football there and the Fire play soccer. Chicago's baseball teams, the Cubs and the White Sox, play at Wrigley Field and Rate Field respectively.
Other write-ups called penguins "amphibious" birds. Penguins are flightless seabirds that spend much of their lives in water and come ashore to breed and moult, but "amphibious" is not a scientific label for them. And while it is tempting to say the birds were "thrilled", nobody can know exactly what a penguin feels. What keepers can observe is behaviour: whether the animals explore calmly, show signs of stress or want to retreat. The aquarium's description focused on the new sights, sounds and textures the birds encountered.
About the Shedd Aquarium
The John G. Shedd Aquarium opened on 30 May 1930 as a gift to the city from the retail executive whose name it carries, though Shedd himself died before it opened. It sits on Chicago's Museum Campus beside Lake Michigan and holds about 32,000 animals from some 1,500 species, with tanks containing around 5 million US gallons of water. Its penguin colony includes both Magellanic and southern rockhopper penguins.
During the pandemic closure, which lasted through the end of 2020 for the general public, the aquarium leaned heavily on online content to stay connected with visitors. The penguin trips became some of its most widely shared moments, and they helped raise interest in its virtual programmes and donations at a time when the institution was losing ticket income.
If you visit today, the penguins are back to entertaining human crowds rather than empty stadiums, but the welfare principle behind the trips still applies: variety, gentle challenges and close attention from the people who look after them.
Sources: Photo and video: Shedd Aquarium (photo by Brenna Hernandez, video by Sam Cejtin); Shedd Aquarium press release: Penguins visit Soldier Field; Wikipedia: Magellanic penguin; Wikipedia: Shedd Aquarium; Wikipedia: Soldier Field.
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