Birdie.

Birdie lives in Ushuaia, at the mouth of the Beagle Channel, the port from which ships set sail south toward the ice expeditions. There, the cold is serious business, and in the portrait he's ready for it: the red coat, the earmuffs and the hat pulled down to his eyebrows. A backpack is what you sling on to head out into the open, and this penguin knows all about the open. Carrying him on your back means heading out well accompanied, wherever the cold bites hardest.

Here's a detail not in the portrait, but one that explains where his people come from: emperor penguin colonies are so large they can be spotted from space, by the stains their guano leaves on the white ice; more than sixty have been found that way. Birdie's people breed far off, on the southern fast ice, and he's a port boy who looks that way. On the backpack you carry him facing forward, against that ice-coloured background: the boy from the last shore, always about to set off. He's part of Animal Kinhood, the portrait series I make as Yago Partal; there's more of him in his biography.