Penguins at the North Pole

Not quite, but an article in the June issue of the Wilson Journal of Ornithology discusses how some penguins may have ended up in northern waters. From the news release:

"Guy Demmert got quite a surprise when he hauled a fishing net into his boat off the coast of southeast Alaska in July 2002. There among the salmon, in living black and white, was a Humboldt penguin, thousands of miles from where any of its kind should have been.
"The flightless bird appeared to be healthy and in good condition, and Demmert snapped its picture before turning the bird loose.
"It wasn't the first sighting of a penguin in Alaskan waters. In fact Demmert himself reported seeing one while fishing in 2001, and in 1976 a research cruise in the Gulf of Alaska recorded the sighting of 'brown penguins.'" ...
"The most probable explanation is that the creatures were hauled aboard boats – probably fishing boats -- in southern waters and were kept by the crews as the vessels traveled far to the north, then were released, concludes a new research paper by Dee Boersma, a UW biology professor noted for her penguin studies, and Amy Van Buren, a UW doctoral student in biology." ...
"The Humboldt is one of 17 penguin species, and is sometimes referred to as the Peruvian penguin because it typically lives along the coasts of Peru and Chile. The Galapagos penguin is the only species that lives north of the equator, and that is only because Isabella Island, one of the Galapagos Islands where the species lives and breeds, lies partially north of the equator.
"There were efforts in the early to mid 20th century to establish breeding penguin colonies in the Northern Hemisphere, mostly in Scandinavia, the researchers noted, but after nearly a decade all the penguins had been killed by predators, died by other means or disappeared.
"Northern sightings of penguins in the wild have been rare. There was a report of a single Humboldt penguin off British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands in 1944; one was reported near Long Beach, Wash., in 1975; three sightings of one to three Humboldts off the coast of Vancouver Island, B.C., were recorded in 1978, with pictures published in local newspapers; and a single penguin was reported off the Washington coast in 1985." ...
"They say it is unlikely the Humboldts swam from Peru to the Pacific Northwest, in part because it would mean traversing climate conditions the birds are not well equipped to handle.
"There also isn't much chance the birds spotted in the wild were zoo escapees, the scientists said. Penguins used to be brought to North American zoos from the south on a regular basis, but those shipments stopped in 1972 with the adoption of international regulations that halted much of the trade. Since then, they said, zoos in the United States have bred penguins in captivity and managed their penguins as one large population, moving individuals from specific zoos to reduce inbreeding. It would not be easy for the birds to escape to the wild from a zoo."