Research Diary

In late October, last year’s tawaki chicks usually start popping up in the breeding colonies. In some years, there are heaps of them, but this year we only saw a handful which suggests that the survival of last year’s chicks cohort wasn’t particularly good. La Niña and the associated warmer ocean temperatures in the Sub-antarctic resulting in lower productivity and less penguin food may have made life exceedingly difficult for many young penguins.

However, a few tough ones did show up on the Shelter and Seymour Islands this year while we were there. Like the fellow below.

Even though the grey beard provides one-year-old tawaki with a rather distinguished old man’s look, the short, pale crest gives their young age away. And as most juvenile tawaki, this one had not a clue what he was supposed to do. It seems as if he (for it is a boy, look at the honker!) wandered aimlessly through the forest and ended up at the least populated eastern side of the East Shelter Island. Eventually he found his wee little nook to plonk down in and contemplate what to do next.

A penguin’s day usually starts pretty early. Tawaki often leave their nest before sunrise. With light levels still below par when it comes to foraging, the birds often spent the first hour or two at sea to have extensive preening sessions…

…or going for a run with the mates.

Filmed with a PenguCam on breeding female from Seymour Island, doubtful Sound, Fiordland, NZ

Often, the cool-down period for a tawaki family after a chick-feeding event is the exact opposite of action packed. Especially if the chick (or chicks) in question are nearing fledging and need a lot of food.

In tawaki, not only is it the mother that has to find, catch and bring home all this food. She also has to regurgitate (nothing but a fancy word for “vomiting”) all the nice tucker for her offspring. It is left to everyone’s imagination how exhausting the whole process is.

No wonder then that after the chick has been fed the social life of the adult tawaki seems to happen in super-slo-mo.

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.

The tawaki breeding season this year is a bit weird.

While in Milford Sound chicks are already ganging up in crèches – something the young ones do when 3-4 weeks old – the penguins in Doubtful Sound are all over the place.

Some nests have big chicks that don’t have any next door neighbours old enough to cuddle with yet. So dad will have to do. In other nests, the chicks have just hatched.

It would seem that the La Niña conditions over the last winter have thrown a spanner in some of the penguins’ works so that they had to work overtime (as in ‘find more food’) to prepare for breeding which made them return a few weeks later than normal. Others, however, apparently managed to come back as planned.But why do we see this in one fjord, but not the other?

As we said… all a bit weird this year.

Last September we deployed our new miniature penguin camera on a breeding female tawaki from Milford Sound/Piopiotahi. The results were incredible.

After the penguin spent the day foraging in the fjord, she returned the same night allowing us to recover the camera. The device recorded roughly 2.5 hours of footage and provides a fascinating insight into the foraging behaviour of tawaki.

While the camera was rolling the bird caught more than 50 individual fish larvae, simply by picking them up in a sort of drive-by fashion – blink and you miss it.

Particularly fascinating were the captures of three squid. When viewing the footage, it really seems like a bad idea for squid to squirt out ink when under threat. Commonly believed to be a strategy to confuse potential predators, for tawaki the ink seemed to indicate that there is prey to find. Squirting proved counterproductive for the cephalopods.
Also fascinating to observe were the pursuits of sprats directly underneath the surface. The agility of the sprat allowing them to do sudden U-turns seems to give the fish a fighting chance.

From a penguin perspective, it is extremely cool to see that all the prey captures occurred from below, where the prey item was clearly visible against the light backdrop of the water surface. So much for the countershading theory…
We plan to deploy more devices this coming season to get a better understanding of the prey composition and the varying foraging strategies of the penguins. So stay tuned!

After almost three long years of trying to get research permits allowing us to add Erect-crested and Eastern Rockhopper penguins to the Tawaki Project portfolio, we today received the signed permit documents.

So expect to learn a lot about penguin species many people do not even know they exist!

UPDATE: While we had planned to go in the first Bounty/Antipodes expedition in late 2021, the funders have pulled out of the project. However, we are working on a new funding scheme and are confident that it will happen in 2022!