These days one has to take with a grain of salt things one reads in a newspaper, other than items appearing in the Bainbridge Review, of course, which all come salt and gluten-free.

I was therefore appropriately salty and skeptical when I read the other day about a King penguin spotted in January on the south coast of Australia. To get to this particular stretch of beach, the penguin would have had to have traveled some 3,700 miles from its home in Antarctica. This is only the third confirmed sighting of a King penguin in Australia since 1987. My skepticism was fueled because King penguins can’t fly, are notoriously slow walkers, and, while they are excellent swimmers, at best they can swim no more than 25 miles per hour. To reach Australia, this penguin would had to have swum at top speed for some 150 hours, or more than six days non-stop.

Assuming that’s what this penguin did, the real question is why would a King penguin, living the cushy life of unlimited lanternfish and krill buffets on a remote Antarctic island free from any terrestrial predators, decide that what it needed was to embark on a 3,700-mileswim in leopard seal and killer whale-infested waters only to arrive on the sun-baked southern shore of Australia?

A ‘Penguin Expert’ with the Australian Antarctic Program opined that the penguin didn’t actually set out to swim to Australia, but rather just set out for an afternoon dip and only came ashore in order to undergo a “catastrophic molt” on warm land rather than in the cold ocean. I can identify with that line of thinking because I once got a bad haircut as a teenager and refused to leave the house for a week. But I’m not buying it in this case.

The article didn’t have a definitive answer to my question, so I did a little penguin research (mostly on Google but with the help of a World Atlas and a YouTube video shot in either Antarctica or Marineland), and I have a couple of theories.

The King penguin is only the world’s second-largest penguin, averaging about 35 inches in height and weighing about 35 pounds. The world’s largest penguin is the Emperor penguin, which averages 47 inches in height and can reach up to 100 pounds. (As an aside, Google claims there are 37 million-year-old fossil records of a “Colossal” penguin species that was over 6 feet tall and weighed 250 pounds, which is one large and old bird).

Could it be that King penguins have harbored a genetic inferiority complex for millennia that is only now giving rise to a spiteful and simmering jealousy toward their larger Emperor penguin cousins? Could this brave King penguin’s epic swim have been an Aptenodyte patagonicus cry for attention, a life-threatening display of penguin courage to let the world know that King penguins will no longer accept second-class penguin citizenship, the ugly penguin stepsisters of the insufferably superior Emperors?

If you don’t like that explanation, I have a backup theory I like even more. King penguins have a life span of about 26 years in the wild. But in captivity, their lifespan is closer to 41 years. Now suppose a random King penguin happened to wander into a study station in Antarctica and, in glancing at an old article in a carelessly tossed-aside issue of National Geographic noticed this significant difference in penguin mortality.

Further assume that our heroic penguin was generally familiar with the history of Australia and understand that, for many years, other countries sent their convicts to Australia. It’s not hard to imagine that our penguin might have mistakenly assumed that living in Australia might be close enough to living in captivity to add some 15 years to its life span. Such a possibility seems like it could motivate a penguin to set off with a compass in flipper for a long swim in search of the good and long Australian life centered around Foster’s Lager, Weet-Bix and Vegemite.

A final note about King penguins; they are one of the few animals that can drink salt water. That skill would come in handy on the notoriously Starbucks-free stretches of open water between Antarctica and Australia. Did I mention that King penguins can sleep standing up or lying down? Or that they can propel themselves up to 9 feet into the air when surfacing after a swim?

If you’re now thinking that having a King penguin as a pet sounds like it might be fun, I should let you know that there is no breeder of King penguins in the United States and it is illegal to import wild birds like penguins into this country. But if you happen to be vacationing on the Southern coast of Australia, keep your eyes turned to the South and make noises like a lantern fish or krill and see what happens.

Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.