AN Adelie penguin named Pingu was found on the shores of New Zealand on Friday — far away from its natural habitat in Antarctica.

After accidentally traveling 3,000 kilometers away from his home, Pingu has become only the third Adelie penguin to have been found on New Zealand’s coasts, the first two making their visits in 1962 and 1993.

“First I thought it [was] a soft toy, suddenly the penguin moved his head, so I realized it was real,” Harry Singh, the resident who found him, told BBC News.

Singh and his wife were walking on the beach at Birdlings Flat, a settlement south of the city of Christchurch, when they came across Pingu.

Singh remembers the penguin looking exhausted, and said it did not move for an hour.

The bird also looked lost and alone in footage shared on Singh’s Facebook page.

“We did not want it to end up in a dog’s or cat’s stomach,” Singh said.

Singh got a hold of Thomas Stracke from the Christchurch Penguin Rehabilitation, who has been rehabilitating penguins on New Zealand’s South Island for about 10 years.

“Apart from being a bit starving and severely dehydrated, he was actually not too bad, so we gave him some fluids and some fish smoothie,” Stracke told The Guardian.

Otago University zoology professor Philip Seddon said Pingu was potentially a younger bird that became entangled in a current that swept him into New Zealand waters.

“I think if we started getting annual arrivals of Adelie penguins, we’d go; ‘Actually, something’s changed in the ocean that we need to understand,’” Seddon told The Guardian. “All species of penguin are like marine sentinels … when they’re doing badly, they’re giving us an early signal – canaries in coal mines – an early signal that things are not good.”

While Adelie penguin populations appear to be stable at the moment — increasing in some areas while decreasing in others — Seddon said changes in penguin behavior could be an early warning sign that the marine ecosystem was in trouble.

“More studies will give us more understanding where penguins go, what they do, what the population trends are like — they’re going to tell us something about the health of that marine ecosystem in general,” he said.

Pingu was eventually released onto a safe beach on the Banks Peninsula south of Christchurch in hopes of helping him to complete his journey home. (SD-Agencies)