Christopher

Our team had just returned from Doubtful Sound, when they received a call that another tawaki that moulted at Penguin Place was ready to be released. Unlike the other birds that had been fitted with satellite tags out on the Otago Peninsula, this one-year old male did not receive and food during his stay at the rehabilitation centre. Because Christopher, that he was called by the Penguin Place staff, was a massive 4.1 kg when he was brought to the centre about a week into the moult. The penguin, therefore, qualified to start in the ‘East Coast’ group of birds.

Christopher was quite lucky. Because he chose to moult at Waldronville, the long sandy beach just South of Blackhead (where Tereza had hauled up in the rocks). The beach is popular with surfers, families – and dog walkers.

What many people do not realize, dogs are the single most important terrestrial predator in penguins. Stoats, rats or possums – the introduced pests targeted by New Zealand’s Predator Free 2050 effort – only play second fiddle when it comes to confirmed penguin kills. Particularly hard hit are Little penguins, not only because that species is found all around New Zealand, but also because the smallest of all penguins likes to breed close, if not right inside, human towns.

When breeding, crested penguins have less of a problem with dogs because their breeding colonies are usually far away from any human settlement. Tawaki, of course, are the exception from that rule. Dog kills of tawaki have been observed at Jackson Head and other sites along the West Coast.

Dog kills are always by uncontrolled canines that either roam around freely at night or are poorly controlled by their owners. Even more infuriating, dogs never kill penguins to eat them – they just kill for fun. That’s why dogs can wipe out entire penguin colonies in one night, because they are never satisfied with their first or second kill.

Quite clearly, Christopher’s choice to moult on a dog walkers beach falls into the category of ‘moulting in a silly place’. In fact, after DOC was contacted by a member of the public about a moulting tawaki on the beach, the rangers found the penguin as a dog was just about to have a play with it. The bird was uplifted just in the nick of time. Sadly, last week an Erect-crested penguin making the same mistake and hung out on the beach, got mauled by a dog. So not even the Covid-19 lockdown prevents dog attack on penguins…

Lucky Christopher spent the next three weeks without any other major interventions at Penguin Place and was released shorty after a satellite tag had been fitted to him.

He spent another couple of nights on the beach before taking off on 22 February. During his first couple of weeks at sea, Christopher travelled south into what was considered the low productivity region of New Zealand’s subantarctic ocean (which, as previously pointed out, likely was different this year). Then he swung around travelled westwards passing the Auckland Islands until he reached the Macquarie Ridge, an underwater mountain range that stretches from southern Fiordland two thirds of the way to Antarctica. Even though the mountain range is some 1000m below the ocean’s surface (with the exception of Macquarie Island, which actually is nothing other than the exposed bit of the Ridge), Christopher seems to know it’s there, because he has been swimming along the mountain range for the past month, although he’s about to reach the end of it soon.

Today, Christopher is about 400 km south of Macquarie Island.