All images © Cindy Schnackel, all rights reserved. Please do not pin my work to Pinterest. Thank you.

Acrylic on canvas board, 5 × 7 inches.

Recently read the book, The Great Penguin Rescue by Dyan DeNapoli, in which the author travels to S. Africa to help wash and rehabilitate tens of thousands of oiled penguins, from a ship that sunk. She also mentioned that in other spills, they dressed oiled birds in tiny sweaters to keep them from ingesting the oil while they waited to be washed and to keep them warm, as the oiled feathers would not hold heat in. Apparently, knitters all over the world provided more than enough sweaters.

So when I read there was a big oil spill in New Zealand recently, (Oct 2011), I wondered if, as the book talked about, they would be using the tiny sweaters. Sure enough, in the news, there were many articles like this one, Group is asking knitters to make sweaters for penguins

But, about the same time, was another article indicating they did not need the sweaters for this particular rescue. Knitting craze fails to help oil hit wildlife I guess they were getting the penguins cleaned and dried right away, and/or felt the stress of being dressed in sweaters might be worse.

In any case, I had to paint a rather disgusted penguin in a tiny sweater, but far from being humorous, in real life these spills are devastating to wildlife and it’s just heartbreaking. I hope that the rescue organizations can, (with or without tiny sweaters), rescue the poor birds.

Also available in an iphone case version.

Penguin Sweater Phone
by Cindy Schnackel