A retired bricklayer and part time fisherman, 71-year-old Joao Pereira de Souza from an island village just outside Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, discovered a tiny penguin languishing on the rocks in 2011.
The helpless creature was starving and covered in oil but de Souza took him in and nursed him back to health, naming the South American Magellanic penguin Dindim.
While it's not recommended, or legal, to keep wild animals as pets in Brazil, Dindim doesn't seem to care. He comes back to live with his best buddy every year since they first met.
And, the flightless bird is believed to swim around 5,000 miles every time he returns.
"I love the penguin like it's my own child and I believe the penguin loves me," de Souza told Globo TV.
"No one else is allowed to touch him. He pecks them if they do. He lays on my lap, lets me give him showers, allows me to feed him sardines and to pick him up."
de Souza says he fed Dindim a daily diet of fish to improve his strength then took him back to the sea to let him go.
"But he wouldn't leave, he stayed with me for 11 months and then just after he changed his coat with new feathers he disappeared," he recalled.
"Everyone said he wouldn't return but he has been coming back to visit me for the past four years. He arrives in June and leaves to go home in February and every year he becomes more affectionate as he appears even happier to see me."
Biologist Joao Paulo Krajewski, who interviewed de Souza for Globo TV, said: "I have never seen anything like this before. I think the penguin believes Joao is part of his family and probably a penguin as well. When he sees him he wags his tail like a dog and honks with delight."
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