Penguin always returns from sea to the man who saved its life

The cat may have come back the very next day, but what about the black and white Magellanic penguin? As one Brazilian man found out, it can’t stay away.

Four years ago, João Pereira de Souza found an oil-soaked bird on the beach near his home in the southeastern part of Brazil, reported The Wall Street Journal. He cleaned him up, fed him sardines, and after waiting for the bird to regain its strength, the former bricklayer set the bird free on the beach.

But what happened next was a complete surprise – the penguin, now known as Jingjing, came back. De Souza even took the bird far out to sea, but the insistent penguin was waiting for him on land when he returned.

The Magellanic penguin is named after the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who first recorded the bird’s existence in 1519.

Listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the species has approached “near threatened” status in the past. Magellanic penguins often found covered in oil, because they swim in high-traffic ocean shipping lanes.

Magellanic penguins are also known to swim thousands of miles between breeding and feeding grounds, according to Good News Network.

According to de Souza, Jingjing will leave the warm climate of Rio de Janeiro for weeks and sometimes months at a time, but will always return, living with him for about eight months a year.