Research Diary

Finding new tawaki colonies often borders on a miracle. Doubtful Sound with all its side-arms and connecting fjords features some 400 km of coastline. Most of it is covered in lush green rainforest that has hypnotic properties if you stare at this green wall for a while through binoculars in the hope of spotting a tawaki landing site.

Somewhere halfway up Doubtful Sound, we found a new, uncharted tawaki colony. While sea kayaking the fjord in late August, Sam Goodall Outdoor Multisport spotted tawaki on a seemingly random rock and snapped a photo which he later relayed to us via Instagram. Armed with a description on where to find this spot, we cruised up and down about 800 m stretch of shoreline in an effort to find Sam’s spot. We were about to give up when we noticed a horizontal tree trunk just above the water line, which matched Sam’s photo.

Covered in lush green forest an old rockfall just behind that tree offered potentially good breeding habitat.

We explored the site, squeezed into narrow caves and – of course – there they were. Tawaki dads guarding their chicks.

The small colony of 5-10 breeding pairs has been mapped as “Sam’s Spot”.

When the Tutuko headed towards the Shelter Islands after our 1-hour survey, we looked back towards the green wall behind which Sam’s Spot is hidden. We asked ourselves how many of these tiny pockets of forest harbouring tawaki colonies there are in Doubtful Sound – and the other fjords. It could be many.

The last tawaki to be fitted with a satellite transmitter was opposite to what is generally called “the early bird”. In fact, this male bird was two weeks behind as other birds fitted with tags.

We first heard of the tawaki in mid-February, when Richard got a message from Tom Woodhouse, a DOC ranger from North Otago who went out for an evening paddle along Kakanui river about 10 km south of Oamaru. He spotted a puffed up tawaki hauled up in a tiny cave in the sandstone cliffs on the Southend of the Kakanui estuary. The bird had just started to drop feathers, so we knew that this guy would not be ready for a satellite tag before early March.

On 6 March, one week after Jean got her device and was released at Penguin Place, Thomas and Ursula drove up north to Kakanui for the deployment. They made their way along the cliffs until the stood in front of Tom’s cave. The penguin was hunched over a pile of feathers and has almost completed the moult. Almost.

The tawaki’s feathers still looked rather dull, a pretty clear indication that they were still growing, and that the penguin hadn’t properly preened his new plumage. He would need another couple of days at least. So, the team would have to come back in a few days.

Thomas and Ursula left Tom – naming the bird after the DOC ranger who discovered it seemed appropriate – and drove back to Dunedin.

Three days later, the entire East coast was engulfed in thick fog. This was welcome weather for the final satellite tags deployment since there was hardly any shade near Tom’s cave, and the cave itself was far too small to fit the device in there. But with this fog, the conditions outside were quite pleasant and not nearly as hot as the day before.

It seemed as if the Kakanui River had risen quite a bit since the last visit. Thomas and Ursula had to wade through knee deep water to get to Tom’s cave. And when Thomas crouched down to get the tawaki out of the penguin’s abode, he found the cave empty; the huge pile feathers had disappeared. Obviously, the river had flooded the cave in the past days. Tom, the penguin, almost certainly got wet feet. Had he left already?

Thomas kept walking along the sandstone cliff and there he was. The tawaki was sitting on a small ledge about 2 m above the water. 20 minutes later, Tom (the penguin) was back in his cave, out of the sun as the fun began to burn away, wearing the last of the 18 satellite transmitters.

Tom spent another couple of days in his cave before he swam down the Kakanui River and out to sea in the morning of 11 March. He travelled east for the first three days and then turned south. He has been swimming that way ever since, hardly deviating from this course. When New Zealand entered its four-week Covid19 lockdown, Tom was about 350 km northeast of the Auckland Islands. Four days ago, he passed Campbell Island and is now approaching the edge of the Campbell Rise. Jean is only about 80 km east of his current position.

Who knows, maybe our last two penguins team up in the coming days? We’ll see…

The final tawaki that ended up in rehabilitation because it decided to moult in a place where it would not find the peace and quiet it needed, is a one-year old female. Unlike some of the other penguins that chose ‘silly places’, this one had the right idea, but still chose a bad spot.

Jean, as she would later be named by the staff at Penguin Place helping her through the moult, came across these really inviting looking caves that were embedded an impressive rock walls topped by dense New Zealand flax patches. At high tide, the water would go all the way past the entrance of the cave, which is probably was probably the case when Jean arrived. She likely swam straight into the dark cave, thinking how lucky she was to find such majestic yet secluded and silent spot to go through a feather change.

Problem is, at low tide the water retreats exposing a flat sandy beach stretching for a couple of hundred metres to the water’s edge. With very few exceptions, tawaki avoid landing on sandy beaches like the plague. They prefer to emerge between rocks that provide shelter if needed. So, it seems doubtful that Jean would have walked into the cave at low tide.

Another problem with Jean’s choice of a moulting spot is that majestic caves found along a sandy beach in New Zealand generally are major tourist attractions. And this certainly applied here, for Jean chose the famous Cathedral Caves in the Catlins.

To make matters worse, January to March is peak season for tourism in the Catlins, and at low tide, hundreds of people walk over to the caves and explore them thoroughly. Which is the worst thing that could happen to a young and little tawaki girl that has just started to drop her feathers.

Luckily, it did not take long for Cheryl Pullar, the local DOC ranger to get wind of Jean’s predicament. Equipped with a crate she rescued the bird from the cave and gave it an exclusive ride to Penguin Place, where Jean would spend the rest of her moult.

On 27 February, it was Jeans day to be released. Thomas and Richard provided her with a transmitting parting gift before she was released where all the other Penguin Place tawaki had been send on their journeys in the previous weeks. After one more night on the beach, she was off on the 28th.

But then she did something unexpected. She swam north! She made it all the way to Oamaru before it dawned on her that this wasn’t the way she was supposed to go. After a couple of days she turned back and solely made her way back down to where she had started her journey. On 3rd March she swam past Penguin Place and continued south-westwards until she was halfway between The Snares and Auckland Islands in mid-March.

Since then Jean has been on a mission to prove her individuality. She keeps going south east and has since crossed the entire Campbell Rise. For the past two weeks she has been dawdling around some 200 km east of Campbell Island.

Talking about ‘silly places’ for penguins to moult at. It would seem as if Shag Point is a magnet for moulting tawaki seeking their own private silly place to drop all their feathers.

About 500 m up the road from the public behind which Katiki decided to spend three weeks of misery, another young male penguin had a similar idea. Only this one thought the public picnic ground would be a sufficiently quiet place for him.

Well, he was wrong. While the prospects of the tawaki landing on a barbecue were slim, becoming a plaything for a family dog seemed a much more likely outcome. So, off to Penguin Rescue the penguin went (where Katiki was already enjoying Rosalie Goldsworthy’s five-star catering services).

On 20 February, with 4.2 kg of meat on his bones, it was time for the bulky boy to be released. But as the weather did not look overly promising – and the experience of Rainy’s deployment still on Thomas and Richard’s mind – it was decided that the penguin would be fitted with his tracker in the comfort of Rosalie’s garage.

Once sporting his unit, the tawaki was transferred into his personal crate and loaded on the Penguin Rescue truck. His release site was a five-minute drive across paddocks to Okahau beach. Richard joined the bird on the back of the truck, less for fear of the crate falling off but rather because there was little room for a person of his size in the front cab.

Okahau, which Rosalie decided would be the penguin’s name, peeped out of his crate as he was carried past soft release pens full of moulting Yellow-eyed penguins/hoiho. Surely, the tawaki felt sorry for the other birds that looked more bedraggled then he did but also were poorly equipped in the head ornamentation department. No crest? Not cool.

When Richard plonked down Okahau’s crate on the red sandy beach and opened the door, the penguin stepped out and appeared positively confused. Where was his pen? What was he doing here? Was this the end of the wellness holiday?

Incredulous he took a step towards the water, before having second thoughts and waddled up to the rocks that Katiki also preferred to a seaward’s departure. And there he remained for the next four days, before coming to grips with the fact that what he’s supposed to do is head south.

Okahau, followed a route that was remarkably like Christopher’s. Three times both penguins’ paths literally crossed with some satellite fixes within a just a few metres from another. But Christopher had left two days before Okahau and he would always maintain his head start. However, there is a clear difference between the two – Okahau seems not to be interested in mountains as he swam straight across the Macquarie Ridge and just kept going southwest.

Today, Okahau is about 2,200 km south of Adelaide, Australia.

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.

The last tawaki to be fitted with a satellite tag on East Shelter Is, and therefore, the last of our ‘normal’ moulters, is a lovely female that occupied one of the two caves at Richard’s honey pot site. Like most other females, she was a calm and cooperative bird that under any other circumstances would have provided the team with a relaxed deployment experience.

But the weather, that developed into a major distraction during Sheldon’s deployment, turned for the worse. Not only kept the wind picking up every minute, but the team was plagued by the bane of device deployments – rain.

On penguins, external devices like dive loggers and satellite tags are attached using the so called ‘Tesa-tape-Method’. It utilizes a special kind of adhesive tape that is threaded under the penguins’ back feathers with the sticky side of the tape facing up. Several rows of tape strips are attached to the feathers before finally the device is placed on the bird and the loose ends of the tape then slung around the unit. A brilliant method that was developed first on penguins in Antarctica.

Problem is, in Antarctica it does not rain, but in New Zealand it does. Especially in Fiordland. Raindrops hitting the sticky side of the tape strips remove all the stickiness, making the tape useless for device attachment.

Thomas was busy arranging the tape strips on the penguins’ lower back when thick drops started to fall. Panicking, Thomas tried to shield the tape with his hands while barking orders to “get a raincoat or something, I dunno!!!”

A few seconds later, a rather intimate situation had developed between Thomas, Myrene and the penguin as all three were huddled under a green oilskin jacket, while operating in the light of head torches, halfway decently protected from the rain. As if on cue, the rain stopped again once the satellite tag was wrapped up securely in the tape and the top layer of epoxy needed to be applied.

This deployment could have been a nightmare, if the penguin would have not been so cooperative. Rainy, an obvious choice for a name, was calm and content on Myrene’s lap throughout the entire procedure. Richard returned Rainy to her cave and while the team rushed head over heels to the landing site to get off the island, Rainy calmly preened the feathers around her device and walked back into her lair.

That evening, Rainy took a wee trip down to the water, swam a few laps around the island before heading back in for a good night’s rest. She continued to go on several day trips before finally embarking on her winter journey in the morning of 28 February. Like Sheldon, she followed a more or less straight southwestern trajectory, stopping occasionally for a day or two, presumably to utilize a prey patch she encountered on the way.

For the past week she has been doodling around in a reasonably small area some 700 km west of Macquarie Is.

Of all the tawaki to be fitted with a satellite transmitter, the tawaki Sheldon is the one that managed to fly under the radar from start to finish.

After Richard’s encounter with his girlfriend’s alter penguin-ego, he pointed the team in the direction of an area that he called the ‘honey pot’. Here, Richard had found two caves with a lot of moulters in them somewhere on far side of the island. It seemed to take hours for the team to make their way through the thick bush on East Shelter Island to get to said ‘honey pot’. The bush bash was exacerbated by Richard’s insistence of using the – alleged – best route, which brought them into even thicker vegetation or on the brink of steep bluffs.

When they finally reached the two caves, these were indeed occupied by penguins, but most of them in various stages of the moult with very few of them suitable for transmitter deployment. To make matters worse, the wind started to pick up which, with two more devices still to deploy on the island, had the potential to become a major problem.

Landing on East Shelter Island can be quite challenging unless the conditions are just right. The Shelter Islands are located right at the entrance of Doubtful Sound and are therefore quite exposed to the swell. Which can quickly pick up if the wind does the same. As such, the team feared that if they did not get the job done quickly, there might be a chance for them to be stranded on the island.

And all of a sudden, there was only one more transmitter to deploy.

It is difficult to comprehend what happened, but somehow Richard located a male penguin in one of the caves and delivered it to Myrene and Thomas who then proceeded with the deployment – with all of them looking up at the tree tops that kept on swaying more violently in the wind by the minute. That the device was nevertheless expertly attached is principally due to the fact that at this stage of the project, a deployment routine had set in so that everyone could have played their part blindfolded. Richard’s photos, who absentmindedly documented the attachment with his camera, can attest to that.

However, the penguin was released back into his cave without any of the team really coming to grips with the fact that they had just attached another transmitter to a bird. But the obligatory profile photo that is to be taken of every tawaki to be marked with a transponder was forgotten. So Richard scrambled back up to the cave and managed to snap two photos of the satellite tagged penguins before it disappeared behind a curtain of tree roots.

And, Sheldon, as the penguin was named continued to be more penguin than a phantom. For the next 12 days, he remained silent. No transmission, no sign that he even existed. Even though the deployment records showed that Sheldon weighed in at a stately 3.05 kg when fitted with device, it seemed increasingly likely that his transmitter had failed or that the bird had removed it while in its underground lair.

But then, in the morning of March 1st, Sheldon pinged home for the first time. He was still there. But most importantly – he was real!

Ever since entering the water, Sheldon seems to be on a mission. With the exception of a four-day doodling intermission when the penguin must have hit a good prey patch about 250 km northwest of the Auckland Island, Sheldon has been swimming along a straight southwestern trajectory. He has overtaken most of his contemporaries that all started their journeys days if not weeks before him (Tom being the only exception, more on him next week).

Currently Sheldon is approximately 1,000 km due south of Tasmania.

Penguins each have their own personality. Every individual is different; some are bold and boisterous, others timid and coy. As a result, we can expect to find a penguin equivalent to any human being.

In the case of Maizie, the third female tawaki we fitted with a satellite tracker on East Shelter Island on 18 February, the connection between penguin attitude and human counterpart was made by Richard Seed.

Our team on East Shelter Is consisted of Thomas Mattern, Richard Seed and Myrene Otis. The three had different jobs to do. While Thomas was responsible for attaching satellite tags and injecting microchips so that the penguins can be identified later even if they have loose their devices (which some of the penguins usually actively work towards; see Tereza, for example). Myrene, who will be doing her Master’s thesis on tawaki in the coming season, was getting experience with keeping birds calm and under control during the attachment process. And Richard was the guy for the toughest job – that is, getting the penguins out of their burrows.

After a reasonably easy assignment at Abbo and Mandy’s nest, Richard came across a very accessible cave containing a slender female that – in theory – was an easy capture. Just close your hands around her back and flippers and lift her up.

While Thomas and Myrene were getting all the gear sorted for the deployment, Richard went ahead and picked up the female. But what was supposed to be an easy, turned out to be a painful job. With many an “Ouch!”, “Ayy!” and “Ooof!” Richard clambered down the bank to the remaining team, all the while getting mauled by the penguin which was biting his hands and any other body part Richard exposed to the fiery little penguin.

Myrene happily surrendered her role of holding the bird during the satellite tag attachment. Even with her head covered, the wee tawaki kept pecking away at Richard who would come out of this experience with quite a few bruises.

“Well, I’ve got a name for this one”, Richard exclaimed during the procedure. The female should be named ‘Maizie’ after Richard’s girlfriend. “As a birthday present”, he added somewhat awkwardly, presumably to convince the others that this was the reason he came up with the name, rather than the mauling the little female inflicted on him.

When Richard finally released Maizie, the penguin, into her burrow, she wasn’t having any of it. Rather than hunkering down, she came rushing after Richard in what looked like a full assault of his ankles. Maizie either tripped or changed her mind, because she ran straight through Richard’s legs and stormed off down the hill, past an astonished Thomas and Myrene.

“That’s Maizie, alright”, Richard muttered conclusively.

Maizie left the island four days later, on 22 February 2020. After following the Fiordland coast south-eastwards, she headed south past the Snares when she turned east roughly following the Snare Trough, a depression of the seafloor running east-to-west halfway between the Snares and Auckland Islands. Something worthwhile must have been in that region, as Maizie spent nearly two weeks in the area before continuing along a long undulating path westward.

Currently, Maizie is about 450 northwest of Macquarie Island.

On our second day out on East Shelter Island, it was the 18 February, we managed to deploy satellite tags on five tawaki. The first two likely candidates were hanging out in a root cave together. One of the penguins was a male with an impressive bill, the other one a female with a determined look. The birds were huddled up together side by side and sitting in what obviously was an active nest only a few weeks ago.

You did not have to be a penguin expert to quickly assume that we had run into a pair that moulted together in last season’s nest. Successful breeders tend to come back to moult in their nests, primarily to show nosy neighbours or young punks that this site is taken. Even when we extracted the female to fit her with a satellite tag, the male did not move.

Of course, we couldn’t pass up the chance to deploy satellite tags on a pair. So once the epoxy had dried on the female’s device, it was the male’s turn to be fitted with a tag. The female peeped out of the burrow while we were attaching the device, obviously interested to have a look at the procedure we went through from the outside. They both were reunited in their nest sporting sat tags 197041 and 197042.

Of all the tawaki that we had to come up with names for during this study, those two were the easiest. The similarities between the two penguins and the Tawaki Project’s hosts in Doubtful Sound/Patea were almost uncanny.

Mandy and Richard ‘Abbo’ Abernathy own and run Fiordland Expeditions that provide sharter cruise services throughout Fiordland. Abbo takes care of the skippering business, while Mandy looks after the books and catering. Abbo, the penguin, is a somewhat rotund male while Mandy, the penguin, came across as rather curious and observant. Indeed, quite comparable to their human counterparts.

Both penguins remained together for a few days after the deployment, then Abbo left on the 22 February. Mandy spent another five days, probably to make sure the books of their nesting operation were in order, before she too left on her journey on 27 February.

Abbo left Doubtful Sound in a westerly direction but over the first week arched round to the South, as if swimming along a quarter circle. When he reached about 50° South, he changed course and headed west-southwest until reached is current position some 1,200 km south of Tasmania.

Amazingly, when Mandy left, she travelled along almost the exact same arc as Abbo had done five days before her. Mandy changed course, just as Abbo did, at around 50° South and has literally been hot on Abbo’s tail ever since. So far, the two penguins’ travel paths are incredibly similar especially when you consider the variability we see in the other tawaki’s movements.

Coincidence? Or perhaps, the pair bond between Abbo and Mandy, that transcends the 500 km of ocean that currently separates them.

Let’s talk about ‘normal moulters’. The great book of penguins claims that the birds generally return to their breeding colonies to go through their annual feather change. In tawaki, this may or may not be. There are a lot of birds the moult on the East coast of New Zealand’s South Island, and the last few days we introduced you to quite a few of them. However, there a no tawaki breeding on this side of the South Island. Perhaps they are young birds that haven’t bred yet, and quite a few like Tereza, Jill and Velma seem to fit that bill.

In the third week of February, we made it to the Shelter Islands at the entrance of Doubtful Sound/Patea, Fiordland. More specifically, on 17 February we landed on East Shelter Island that we had visited on a recce trip last September. And we found it full of tawaki.

The island itself is a nightmare to move around. The forest is packed to the brim with supplejack vines that sling themselves around body parts and backpacks with glee. And a lot of the moulting tawaki seem to be running around freely in this mess. They hang out in small groups and are very mobile. So, finding a likely candidate for a satellite deployment was a bit of daunting task to start with.

Until we came across a pair that were hanging out in dirt cave under a massive tree root. The female looked at us incredulously and was visibly confused when we picked her up to attach a device. Her apparent mate, evidently a truly gallant hero, buggered off and was nowhere to be found henceforth.

Shelley, as we quickly named the female as she was our first bird on Shelter Island, remained calm during the deployment period. She also maintained her confusion as to what had happened to her after we released her back into her dirt cave. In fact, as if to double check that what just happened really happened, she walked right back out towards us to give us a seriously befuddled look.

Shelley left the island early the next morning but returned after exploring the outer ranges of Doubtful Sound to spend another night at home. On 19 February she left Fiordland for good. For the first couple of weeks at sea, she followed the example of the East coast penguins in that she travelled in a south-westward direction.

But around 5th March she turned due west. She has been swimming along the 10-11°C water temperature isolines which mark the location of the Subtropical Front (STF) where warm subtropical water (10-20°) meets cool subantarctic water (4-10°C). This front is a physical barrier where penguin prey tends to accumulate – and which is the main region that closely related Snares penguins tend to go on their winter journeys.

Today, Shelley is about 450 km due south of Tasmania.