THEY may be an endangered species – but it’s been a bumper year for Humboldt penguins on the North Yorkshire coast.

Staff at the Sealife Centre in Scarborough are celebrating after a record breeding year with the birds, which are usually found in Chile and Peru.

Three chicks have been bred this year and the latest, nicknamed Dangermouse, hatched in July to join Hazel and Barnacles, born at the end of March.

However, unlike Hazel and Barnacles, who were hand-reared when they weren’t gaining any weight, Dangermouse’s parents Georgie and Krusty were finally able to rear the little one themselves.

Head of animal care Lyndsey Crawford-Darwell said:“In the past Georgie hasn’t been the best parent and we’ve had to hand rear her chicks ourselves. But this seems to have been the year it clicked and she and Krusty have been brilliant.

“They’re quite unorthodox parents, choosing to nest under a plastic box right next to walkway that our guests use to walk through the enclosure rather than using one of the specially designed nesting boxes.

“Over the past week, Dangermouse seems to have been testing his parent’s patience as they’ve kicked him out of the nesting box to venture into the enclosure. In the next few weeks he will learn how to behave around the other penguins and start swimming in the pools.”

It will be another few weeks before it is known if Dangermouse is a boy or a girl, when the first adult feathers can be sent away for DNA analysis.