Story Archive

Sweating to the Oilers

After the container ship Rena caused New Zealand’s worst maritime environmental disaster in October 2011, Maree Buskey went into action. To help save the penguins affected by the oil spill, she organized a knitting circle to make them sweaters — which keep them from preening and thus ingesting the oil. The pattern was released after a 1995 oil spill killed 17,000 penguins. “Next thing you know it went quite viral,” Buskey says, with thousands of tiny sweaters showing up from all over the world. “Probably the most impressive was someone who went to the trouble of knitting the colors of every single one — as it was then — 16 Australian rules football team jumpers,” said Peter McGlone, director of the Tasmanian Conservation Trust, about the response back then. “And on the back was the number of the captain of each team.” Buskey followed Tasmania’s example after New Zealand’s spill, but it turns out the sweaters weren’t needed since rescuers were able to immediately clean all the penguins. So, she put them on life-sized stuffed penguins and is selling them to raise money for a wildlife fund. (MS/Australian ABC) ...Cuteness 1, Oil Barons 0.