September 2018

The Tawaki Project 2018 is underway!

This time we kicked off fieldwork in Milford Sound. The fjord presented itself in all its mystical glory with mist clinging to its almost vertical mountain flanks.

We came armed with four GPS dive loggers to put on female penguins. And as if a cruise through Milford Sound to reach your field site wasn’t enough, we were greeted by a pair of Whio or blue ducks, a rare but in this case encouraging sight. It’s a good indicator that stoats may be only a minor problem along the Harrison Rive. Good news for the penguins, for sure.

The Harrison Cove bush greeted us with a surplus of green and moisture. The penguins were, for the most part, where we expected them to be, doing what we thought they were doing – incubating in their rock-sheltered nests.

On all of the nests, male penguins were sitting on their progeny. This ranged from a couple of eggs all the way to a fairly chunky chicks that are a week or older. Around half of the birds were still on eggs, which ruled them out for our GPS logger deployment plans.

A few females returned to their nests in the afternoon. Rather than overly disturbing them when they should feed their chicks, we decided to come back after dark when the families have settled down.

And we managed to get two devices out… and get the first GLS loggers we deployed last season off two lucky females.
The next day we continued our nest checks. We deployed time-lapse cameras on our logger nests and tried to get accurate GPS positons of our nests (we failed on that front, the forest is simply too thick.

Shortly before the Discovery Centre closed shop, we headed back down to the beach and with the last cruise boat back to harbour.

As nasty weather crept closer towards Milford Sound, we got cosy in the DOC house while patiently waiting for 354 days’ worth of GLS data to be downloaded from this season’s first loot. Pity that we had to bring two of our GPS dive loggers back. Well, there will be more females willing to cooperate when we return next week.

Up next – Jackson Head and the West Coast.

Our ‘Marathon Penguins’ have made quite a splash! Quite more of a splash than we honestly expected. In the days after the paper was published on PLoS One, news stories started to pop up in media outlets across the world. All of a sudden our ‘tawaki at sea’ photo was featured in articles published in all kinds of languages reaching all kinds of audiences.

Probably we need to stop using the phrase ‘tawaki are one of the least known penguin species in the world’ now!

Below are a selection of news clippings we collected. (There are far too many to put them here!)