Roxie

With New Zealand now going into full lock-down due to Covid-19 we here at the Tawaki Project will be confined to home office work for the foreseeable future. So plenty of time to tell you about those 18 tawaki that are currently carrying satellite trackers. Let’s start with Roxie.

The small female tawaki was a surprise penguin for us. Richard Seed and Thomas Mattern went to the Oamaru Blue Penguin Colony in late January to inspect a tawaki that was moulting on their premises. That bird (Velma, more on her in a few days) was not quite ready to be fitted with a tag. So Thomas and Richard drove back to Dunedin.

Later that day, however, a post popped up on Facebook by BIRDS SITE NZ. They had spotted a tawaki in the rocks directly below the OBPC. The penguin was out for a drink and by the looks of it, already fully moulted.

So up to Oamaru Thomas and Richard went the next day again. The clambered down the rocks, keeping a troupe of young fur seals at bay, and found the tawaki dozing in the pack of a rock crevice. It took Richard a bit of Gymnastics to get the penguin out of its hole.

She was a small bird, in good nick and stunningly beautiful. The penguin also was very kind and cooperative when the satellite tag was fitted to its lower back. She was released back into her little nook about half an hour later. Only a few minutes after her release she was back out on the rocks again for a drink.

Roxie, as she was named by Philippa Agnew, research manager at the OBPC, spent one more night in Oamaru before she headed off into the big blue on 2nd February. At the time of this post, she has traveled past all the sub-antarctic islands and currently is about 1,500 km / 930 miles south of Oamaru, and less than 1,300 km / 800 miles from Antarctica. However, our guess is that she will head west fairly soon and follow the Polar Front, an oceanographic feature that separates cool sub-antarctic water from cold polar waters further south.