November 2021

An unusually crowded caravan of tawaki at the Northern Landing on East Shelter Island.

Although there are an estimated 110-120 tawaki breeding pairs on the island, you hardly ever see more than one or two at a time.

On one hand, this is due to the fact that there are four main landing sites as well as a handful of smaller landings. So the 240 or so breeding adults distribute themselves quite a bit.

On the other hand, tawaki have experienced considerable hunting pressure over that past 600-800 years. So emerging from the bush in large numbers is a bad idea as it would make a penguin hunter’s life very easy.

One side effect of this is that filming tawaki is a real challenge and requires a lot of patience. But, according to the film crew that worked with us in Doubtful Sound/Patea, this made spotting tawaki so much more exciting and rewarding.

Mini-crèche (by crested penguin standards) of tawaki chicks in a tree root cave on East Shelter Island. As the chicks get older their parents leave to their own devices during the day. Chicks from nests that have neighbours, start to wander over to see what the kids next door are up to.

Here we have the youngsters from nests SE14a, SE14b and SE15 having a bit of a sit in at number 15’s nest bowl.

Tawaki breeding in the open are pretty rare. Open nests that can be viewed from some distance away eve rarer.

But that is exactly what a camera man trying to film breeding tawaki wants.Well, nest SE70c met all the required criteria and, thus, became the hero nest for a documentary shoot that we supervised for the last few weeks.

The few clips we’ve seen were amazing. But it’s another couple of years until the will be broadcast. We, for one, are counting the days!

A tawaki road block on East Shelter Island, Doubtful Sound/Patea.

While working with the local penguin population – filming for a major documentary series and continuing our research on the side – we frequently had to cross the island. The track passes along one of the manliest and most populated (7 nests!) tree root caves on the island.

One day we were making our way back to our boat landing, when we ended up in a stand-off with a troupe of penguins that emerged from said cave, I suppose for a breath of fresh air (with 9 chicks not potty trained the cave is a rather smelly affair).

There we were, three humans and four penguins just eyeing each other up for several minutes. It was a rare and special moment where we could be really close to the birds without them making a hasty retreat.