West Coast Penguin Trust

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Kia Ora,

The snow has finally arrived, and so have the first kororã eggs of the season! I have been out monitoring the sites and expect to find more eggs next time. Watch this space!

Sustainable Coastlines paid another visit to the West Coast and a fantastic collaboration took place, as usual, with a beach clean up, litter survey and school visit. Thank you to the local Hokitika schools for all their hard work.

A new species of fossil penguin has been discovered and named Eudyptula wilsonae, after the late New Zealand ornithologist Kerry-Jayne Wilson MNZM, an internationally respected seabird researcher and advocate for conservation, and of course chair and scientist for the West Coast Penguin Trust for many years.

A new and exciting Tawaki Cam Campaign has been launched, which would give us all an opportunity to watch live action from within a tawaki colony. Read on to find out how you could be involved.

And as usual, some interesting penguin related articles from around the globe.

Thank you again for your interest and support so far in 2023 and we continue to be grateful for any donations and penguin sighting stories that we receive.

Stay warm and well this winter.

Lucy Waller

Ranger, West Coast Penguin Trust

PS We will continue to give you the DOC hotline each time so that it's handy if you come across an injured penguin or any wildlife that seems to be struggling whilst out there on the beach, river mouths or roads: 0800 DOCHOT (362 468), and again, do all you can to ensure sick or injured wildlife are safe from dogs.

Also, if you see or hear about a dead penguin, please let us know using our simple reporting form or drop us an email, ideally with a photograph, and, if you can have a look and it's obvious or apparent, your thoughts on possible cause of death. We can then add the information to our database - which informs our conservation actions.

Kororā season on the West Coast has begun

It's official... our Charleston penguin colony had their first eggs laid in the first week of August this year.

We will be doing fortnightly checks of the colony to find out how it is going and we are hoping for a better year than last year. We will report back.....watch this space.

It's that time of year where little penguins or kororā start laying eggs, usually a clutch of two, to incubate for approx 36 days.

News from the schools

We are excited to welcome back some old schools we worked with when we first started our education journey on the West Coast as well as newcomers to the programme. We look forward to supporting those schools in their projects and penguin journeys.

It is a great opportunity to fit the national curriculum's new 'local' element into lesson planning, with penguin education and a project to help protect a very local declining seabird species.

It is also very timely to learn about seabirds at the end of the marine heatwave we experienced last summer here on the West Coast. It is likely that it directly affected the breeding success of little penguins. This is an opportunity for conversations about climate change with the students and its impact on our marine environment, on our beloved penguins as well as on us humans.

Read more on our Education page here.

Students trying to get home to 'their chicks' through all the obstacles that a penguin has to endure on its journey each day.

Kaniere Primary carrying out their litter survey at Hokitika Beach.

Nest box project for schools and community groups

Having visited our Charleston blue penguin colony last week, I noticed that some of the nest boxes were very old and need replacing. It is a perfect project for school students this year, ready for installing before the 2024 breeding season.

If you are a school or community group and interested in helping our local penguins, this might be the perfect project for you.

Bill Johnson on a nest box installation mission with Cobden School students.

Keeping predators at bay at Cape Foulwind

We carry out monthly trap checks at this time of year, outside the sooty shearwater season, to protect Wall Island and its dense population of seabirds from rats and stoats.

Trap maintenance is then carried out fortnightly in the sooty breeding season, between October and April. We catch a steady stream of rats and the occasional stoat.

We are still not sure what the main threat to the lack of successful breeding for the sooties at Cape Foulwind is, although we believe it may be weka taking the chicks, and not rats or stoats.

We will keep investigating this situation so that, if measures can be taken to protect the nesting sooties and their eggs and chicks, we'll endeavour to take them.

Read about our Cape Foulwind/Wall Island project here

Volunteer Sharon Macleod helped me on this occasion, not shy of the rotting rat carcasses! Many thanks Sharon!

To South America and back, the annual migration of Westland petrels / tāiko

An interim report from the latest research into Westland petrels/ tāiko reveals how deep they dive and a new understanding of their annual migration to South America, more than 'simply' crossing the Pacific ocean.

Find out more here.

Kerry-Jayne Wilson MNZM remembered

Roughly three million years ago, tiny penguins toddled around New Zealand, according to a new study. Eventually, these small creatures became extinct, but their relatives, known as little penguins, blue penguins, fairy penguins or kororã, live on today in Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand.

This newly identified species of fossil penguin has been named Eudyptula wilsonae after the late New Zealand ornithologist Kerry-Jayne Wilson MNZM, an internationally respected seabird researcher and advocate for conservation, and chair and scientist for the West Coast Penguin Trust.

Artist's impression of Eudyptula wilsonae

News from a South Westland tawaki colony

From Dr Gerry McSweeney

"Since 1989 when we opened Wilderness Lodge Lake Moeraki, each year at the beginning of July we have welcomed Tawaki/Fiordland Crested Penguins returning to the Lake Moeraki coastal forests to start their five month breeding season. They have swum about 2,000 kilometres from their Sub-Antarctic Convergence summer feeding grounds halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica. This is a remarkable journey. Satellite transponder studies by the Tawaki Project show they may have swum a total of nearly 10,000km over that 6 month period."

We have pulled some facebook posts with photos and videos, news stories and the RNZ interview that arose from this news into one place - find them here.

Getting behind the Tawaki Cam campaign

We're getting behind a campaign to get a live Tawaki Cam - will you?

The Tawaki Trust is proposing the installation of a camera with live feed from a Fiordland crested penguin/tawaki colony in Harrison Cove, a remote part of Milford Sound.

The Tawaki Trust have launched their crowdfunding campaign via PledgeMe to raise a chunk of the cost, hoping that the lottery funding will help too.

This would be a huge asset for education and awareness of this wonderful penguin, so rarely seen and thus under valued.

Watch more about this exciting project here.

Follow them on facebook here.

In other penguin news ...

Speaking of Tawaki ... Fiordland penguins found in SA, WA and Victoria - a sign of tough feeding conditions

Our precious Tawaki/Fiordland crested penguins are making it to Australia but very poorly it seems. Penguin Scientist Dr Thomas Mattern said warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures caused by La Niña conditions, particularly in the western Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea in the past few years, have disrupted ecological processes in the open ocean.

A recent spate of tawaki being washed ashore in South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria are a sign of a hard winter for the rare New Zealand birds, a university researcher says.

Read the story here

Unfortunately Tawaki are not the only penguin species struggling this year

The deaths of thousands of penguins in Uruguay leave authorities clueless.

Over 2,000 Magellanic penguins, mostly juveniles, appear to have died in the Atlantic Ocean and were carried by currents to the coast of eastern Uruguay.

Read the story here

Penguin poop is krilly(!) important to ocean health

Large marine mammals such as baleen whales play a huge role in cycling iron through their marine environments, directly helping to boost phytoplankton growth and atmospheric carbon sequestration.

Now for the first time, scientists have discovered how a much smaller animal, such as a chinstrap penguin, with no less mighty a digestive system, has been pumping more than a million pounds of iron to the surface waters of the Southern Ocean each year, helping that essential plant plankton to thrive.

Find out more here.

We thank you for your support and

look forward to a successful year for penguins and everyone!

Don't forget to follow us on Facebook to keep up to date with all the important and fun local penguin news!

And remember our website also has all the latest news, up-to-date information about the Trust, our projects and much more!

Stay connected....

www.westcoastpenguintrust.org.nz/

Coming soon:

An update from the field on the penguin breeding season
News from our local schools about their penguin projects
More interesting articles relating to seabirds and our marine environment
And much more - local as well as some other penguin news and interesting stories from around the globe

West Coast Penguin Trust

info@westcoastpenguintrust.org.nz | www.westcoastpenguintrust.org.nz

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