Plastic fantastic? Zoo worker Emma Horton, 28, with one of the model penguins at Telford Exotic Zoo

The penguins at Telford Exotic Zoo are unusually quiet. They don’t eat much, and you won’t spot them waddling about in their new £60,000 enclosure.

That’s because they’re made of plastic. Hit by a serious shortage of the birds, the zoo owner had to take desperate measures. So he used models to create an instant population.

The zoo had been looking for six Humboldt penguins, native to Chile and Peru, and favoured by British zoos partly because they cope well with the climate. They are, however, classified as a vulnerable species and cannot be taken from the wild, with zoos having to acquire birds from other zoos.

There has been a shortage of the birds in the UK since a 2016 avian malaria outbreak wiped