Rabbits often produce one litter a month, turtles yield hundreds of hatchlings and provide no parental care, Robins lay 3-4 clutches per year, about half of the chicks do not survive. Penguins tend to go for the opposing parenting strategy of “putting all your eggs in one basket”. And often there is only one egg.

Far from deserting their young, penguins are super-parents. Compared with most sea-birds, penguins have a very long pre-fledge duration; from 56 days in the Adelie Penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) to a staggering fifteen months in the King Penguin. Penguin parental care can be divided into two periods. During the guard phase, penguin parents brood the chicks intensively, the female often returns to the sea to forage during this period, which can last up to 37 days. In the next phase the chicks form tight groups, or creches as they’re called.

For Penguin parents, each fledgling represents a huge investment. They first breed when they are around three years old. The parents spend one summer and two winters raising their young.

Penguins are doting parents from the moment their egg is laid, long before it hatches. They have to be, for the chick to survive -- they breed during the winter, and the egg must incubate in harsh weather. After the egg hatches, the chick's parents continue taking care of him for several months, until he is grown enough to learn to hunt for his own food.

Penguins always breed during the Antarctic winter, laying their eggs in May. After the female lays her egg, she passes it off to the male, who keeps it warm by tucking it under a pouch of skin above his feet. He balances the egg there for about 64 days, during which time the female travels to the ocean to hunt. The male huddles with the other males in his colony, and they help each other stay warm while they fast, incubate their eggs and dutifully wait for their partners to return.

The colony's females return around the time that the eggs hatch, with bellies full of food to feed their young. They take over caring for the hatchlings, regurgitating the food they caught while the males travel to the ocean for their first meal in more than 100 days. For the next 50 days or so, the parents continually switch back and forth, one hunting while the other stays with and feeds the chick.

Penguins don’t feed in a regular way; most birds do but have multiple ways to feed their chicks. Penguins usually eat fishes, skrill, and squid, which they hunt from the sea or get from the underside of the ice, and this is what they feed to their babies. The penguins consume the whole food with the help of sharp pointy bills on their mouth and tongue as they don’t have teeth, which they, later on, feed their babies in three ways.

First is by regurgitating the food in which the penguin semi-digests the food which it puts in the chick’s beak as the chick cannot digest the food on its own. This process usually takes several hours.

The second is by refrigerating the food in which the penguin swallows the whole food, such as a fish in its stomach. The penguin has special enzymes in its stomach which prevent the food from being spoiled that is later fed to the baby penguin. The food is kept warm by the penguin’s body temperature.

The third way is through creating a mixture of food which is also known as crop milk. When the penguin eats a krill or a fish, the nutrients such as proteins and fats are secreted from the food in the form of milk similar to mammal milk that is fed to the chicks.

Baby penguins tend to stay with their parents for several months, depending on the species. The chick of Adelie penguins stays for about nine weeks, whereas the chick of Emperor penguin stays for up to thirteen months. The duration depends on the time the baby penguin develops its waterproof feathers.

Once the chick has its own waterproof feathers, it has grown in size and can’t stay glued to its parents, so it goes off to hunt with other fellow chicks under the supervision of an adult penguin. Since chicks are still on the target of predators, they can’t wander off alone. Once the chick reaches an adult stage, the penguin becomes independent of its parents and hunts on its own.