Successful breeding season for Banks Peninsula penguins

Yellow-eyed penguin chick.
Photo credit: Banks Peninsula
Conservation Trust

NEW ZEALAND - Intensive management of yellow-eyed penguins on Canterbury’s Banks Peninsula appears to be paying off.

The very small population of the endangered penguins living on the south-eastern shores of the Banks Peninsula has grown, thanks to considerable predator control and monitoring of the local population by the Wildside Project.

The Project reported that six yellow-eyed penguin chicks were successfully raised this breeding season, an improvement on five the previous season. This is a small but significant increase for a population of less than 20 adults with seven nests this year, and several juvenile birds.

Pest-free Macquarie Island now a penguin haven

Royal penguin on Macquarie Island.
Credit: M Murphy
via Wikimedia Commons.

AUSTRALIA - This month brings great news for about 2 million penguins: following a successful pest eradication programme, Australia's Minister for the Environment, the Hon Greg Hunt MP, officially declared that Macquarie Island is pest-free.

The programme was funded by the Australian and Tasmanian governments, which invested more the AU$24 million to ensure the World Heritage-listed island is preserved. Eight years ago, WWF-Australia and Peregrine Adventures invested AU$100,000 to kickstart the programme.

Mr Hunt said, "[The programme's] success is due to the hard work and dedication of scientists, ecologists, hunters and trainers and their remarkable detector dogs."

Adélie penguin population approaches a 30-year high

ANTARCTICA - The Adélie penguin population in Antarctica's Ross Sea is booming, with numbers looking to be the highest they've been for 30 years.

While exact results of the latest census of won't be available for two months, current trends indicate that there could have been over a million Adélie penguin pairs breeding in the western Ross Sea over this Southern Hemisphere summer.

Knit a jumper, save a penguin - or do you?

Update: The Penguin Foundation has responded to the issues discussed in this post in an article in The Guardian (11 March 2014)

AUSTRALIA - The Penguin Foundation's 'global callout' for knitted little penguin jumpers (sweaters) on ABC News has again raised the issue of whether these (adorable) woollen garments should be used on the birds after an oil spill.

Little penguins: welcome to the eco-dome

AUSTRALIA - This month Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, welcomed two captive bred little penguins to its state-of-the-art Biology Discovery Centre.

The pair were relocated on 14 February from the Granite Island Penguin Centre, where they have been hand-reared. They will live in a specially-designed three-storey “eco-dome”, which is connected to animal behaviour laboratories in the $8 million centre.

Disastrous breeding season for yellow-eyed penguins

A starving yellow-eyed
penguin chick in the Catlins
weighed just 3.5 kilograms.
Credit: DOC

NEW ZEALAND - Starving yellow-eyed penguin chicks are receiving supplementary feeding from penguin conservation organisations during one of the most disastrous breeding seasons in recent years.

Penguin Place on Otago Peninsula, the Katiki Point Penguin Trust in North Otago and volunteers, with the support of the Department of Conservation (DOC), are supplementary feeding the chicks to give them and their parents a better chance at survival.

A shortage of food for the chicks has resulted in low numbers of chicks surviving to three months and low weights, DOC ranger Mel Young said.

Yellow-eyed penguins feed in straight lines off the Otago coast

NEW ZEALAND - A research team at the University of Otago has discovered that the endangered and endemic yellow-eyed penguin forages in straight lines for several kilometres by following furrows in the seafloor scoured out by fishing trawlers.

Using GPS dive loggers the researchers monitored the penguins’ movements over three years showing the birds use furrows scoured on the seabed by otter boards from trawl nets to find food, particularly blue cod.