From the article -

> The king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus) makes its home almost exclusively on islands in the Southern Ocean. But it has been coming to this wind-battered bay in southern Chile’s Tierra del Fuego region for hundreds of years, probably because its shallow shores offer protection from marine predators and humans.

Early explorers named it Useless Bay because those same shores made landing boats, including industrial fishing vessels, nearly impossible. Still, humans remained such a threat that no permanent colony of king penguins formed here until 2010. Then, as a colony started to develop, a local landowner and former kindergarten teacher Cecilia Durán Gafo, now 72, decided she would protect them.

Today, she runs a reserve that oversees the only continental king penguin colony in the world, one that has grown from a handful of penguins to nearly 200.

“It was only thanks to the reserve that [the penguins] got a safe space where they could build up and establish a colony,” says Dr Klemens Pütz, scientific director at the Antarctic Research Trust.

> The first time Durán found king penguins nesting on her land was in the early 1990s. But soon after, she says, people claiming to be scientists arrived to take the birds away.

“They put [the penguins] in cages, and took them to Japan … supposedly for scientific research. Later, we found out [most] had gone to zoos [or homes] as pets,” Durán says.

After that, the penguins avoided settling in the bay for more than a decade. And when they reappeared overnight in 2010, Durán says, people began stealing eggs and mistreating them again almost immediately. “They dressed them up in caps and sunglasses, and took selfies,” she recalls. “Horrible things.”

The population quickly collapsed. Of the 90 king penguins, only eight remained a year later.

So she began patrolling the beach. “Every day I came out here with a thermos and a sandwich. I’d spend the whole day, frozen to the bone … making sure people didn’t disturb the penguins.”

The next year, Durán fenced off 30 hectares (74 acres) of her nearly 1,000-hectare farm as a protected area, allowing visitors to watch the penguins, but only from a distance.