Jill

March 29, 2020 at 3:35 pm

On 4 February 2020, the DOC Otago regional office received an email from Jill Taylor living out at Doctor’s Point, a 20 minute-drive north of Dunedin. She was out on a rockpooling outing at the Maputahi Pa site, a rocky peninsula that once upon a time was the site of a small Maori fortress (‘pa’), when she came across a penguin looking rather bedraggled. She attached a few images to her email – showing a tawaki female halfway through the moult.

Jill was concerned about the safety of the bird due to the fact that people often take their dogs to the beach. DOC Otago on one hand busy with another poor hoiho penguin season and well aware that the Tawkai Project was looking for wild moulting tawaki, asked us to have a look and move the bird if necessary.

Looking rather not fashionable – Jill a couple of weeks into the moult.

The next morning, Thomas drove over and had a low tide stroll to the rockpools at the eastern end of the peninsula. It did not take long to find the rock under which Jill had found the penguin on the previous day. Alas, the penguin was gone. Yet, by now we are quite used to the fact that tawaki are real pros at hide-and-seek, so Thomas started to look under rocks in the vicinity – to find the penguin in a reasonably deep and narrow cave, quite out of reach of any nosy dog. She still had a least two more weeks to go, so he left her where she was and was on his way.

Richard waiting for the epoxy sealing Jill’s satellite tag to dry at Maputahi Head.

Nine days later, after they had already fitted satellite tags to Katiki and Velma, Thomas and Richard walked out to the rockpools again. And there she was, in beautiful new plumage with a radiant blue sheen. Jill, named after her discoverer, proved to be just as gentle as Velma so that the deployment took just over 15 minutes. In no time, she was back in her cave and Thomas & Richard en route to a well-deserved beer after a busy day.

Jill on the front porch of her moult hide-out the evening before here departure to the Subantarctic.

Jill left early the following morning. She has been on a south-western trajectory ever since. Interestingly, she also hit that food patch off the Catlins (like Sandy, Motley and Danny) although Jill was first on that party and had a go at whatever prey she found a day before the others even got there. Jill has been doodling around quite a few times since then.

She passed the Auckland Islands in early March and is currently about 320 km west of Macquarie Island.

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