King penguins take more than a year to raise a chick. The egg is incubated on the feet for around eight weeks, and the chick is then fed intensively through the subantarctic summer, becoming a fat brown-woolly bird that early sailors mistook for a separate species. Through winter the parents range far offshore and visits become rare.
The chick survives on stored reserves, returning meals arriving sometimes weeks apart, and can lose a substantial fraction of its body mass before feeding resumes in spring. Fledging follows in the summer after hatching. Because the cycle overruns a year, a pair that succeeds breeds late the next season, and typically manages two chicks in three years rather than one a year.
The frequent error is treating the winter gap as neglect or as evidence of failure. It is the normal course of the cycle. What remains genuinely uncertain is how shifts in the position of the Antarctic Polar Front, where the parents feed, will lengthen those foraging trips.