Research Diary

We made it to Doubtful Sound/Patea with the help of the fantastic people of Fiordland Expeditions (fiordlandexpeditions.co.nz) to test the waters for the next phase of the Tawaki Project. From next year onward we want to have a look how the penguins use the second longest fjord (40 km!) when foraging. Do they head out to the sea or do they stay in the fjord like their counterparts in Milford Sound/Piopiotahi?

In the late afternoon the Tutoko dropped us off on one of the Shelter Islands which sit exposed right at the entrance if the fjord. Landing there is a bit of a nightmare but once we were in the forest, tawaki land greeted us with a penguin version of Hobbiton. Most penguins breed in ‘holes in the ground’ under a canopy of intricate tree root tangles. And quite a few of them were sitting on young chicks.

Thomas caught up with Alison Ballance at the Birds NZ annual conference in Wellington last weekend. They had a chat about the study of the tawaki pre-moult and winter dispersal, the mind boggling results we got, and how we explain the penguins’ behaviour.

Alison published the interview as part of her “Our Changing World” podcast series for Radio New Zealand. You can listen to the episode here or go to the Podcast website over on RNZ.

The Tawaki Project 2018 is underway!

This time we kicked off fieldwork in Milford Sound. The fjord presented itself in all its mystical glory with mist clinging to its almost vertical mountain flanks.

We came armed with four GPS dive loggers to put on female penguins. And as if a cruise through Milford Sound to reach your field site wasn’t enough, we were greeted by a pair of Whio or blue ducks, a rare but in this case encouraging sight. It’s a good indicator that stoats may be only a minor problem along the Harrison Rive. Good news for the penguins, for sure.

The Harrison Cove bush greeted us with a surplus of green and moisture. The penguins were, for the most part, where we expected them to be, doing what we thought they were doing – incubating in their rock-sheltered nests.

On all of the nests, male penguins were sitting on their progeny. This ranged from a couple of eggs all the way to a fairly chunky chicks that are a week or older. Around half of the birds were still on eggs, which ruled them out for our GPS logger deployment plans.

A few females returned to their nests in the afternoon. Rather than overly disturbing them when they should feed their chicks, we decided to come back after dark when the families have settled down.

And we managed to get two devices out… and get the first GLS loggers we deployed last season off two lucky females.
The next day we continued our nest checks. We deployed time-lapse cameras on our logger nests and tried to get accurate GPS positons of our nests (we failed on that front, the forest is simply too thick.

Shortly before the Discovery Centre closed shop, we headed back down to the beach and with the last cruise boat back to harbour.

As nasty weather crept closer towards Milford Sound, we got cosy in the DOC house while patiently waiting for 354 days’ worth of GLS data to be downloaded from this season’s first loot. Pity that we had to bring two of our GPS dive loggers back. Well, there will be more females willing to cooperate when we return next week.

Up next – Jackson Head and the West Coast.

Our ‘Marathon Penguins’ have made quite a splash! Quite more of a splash than we honestly expected. In the days after the paper was published on PLoS One, news stories started to pop up in media outlets across the world. All of a sudden our ‘tawaki at sea’ photo was featured in articles published in all kinds of languages reaching all kinds of audiences.

Probably we need to stop using the phrase ‘tawaki are one of the least known penguin species in the world’ now!

Below are a selection of news clippings we collected. (There are far too many to put them here!)

Today we celebrate the publication of our Marathon penguins paper in the Open Access journal PLoS One. For all of you that do not want to grind through a lengthy scientific text our friend Giselle Clarkson has summed in up perfectly:

We’re back in Milford Sound to deploy four satellite trackers on tawaki that have just completed their moult. Conditions in the fjord were terrible. No rain. Balmy climate. Dolphins riding the bow wave of the Pride taking us to the Discovery Centre. Just terrible.

Together with the Andrea from Southern Discoveries, we were dropped off in Harrisons Cove just after lunch. And not long after we had hopped out of the DC tender we spotted a tawaki in the first stages of moulting stumbling out of the bush to get a drink out on the beach. The poor thing looked positively bedraggled and we waited until it had returned into the cool shade of the forest.

Most of the penguins we encountered, however, were almost through with their moult sporting beautiful blueish-black plumage just waiting for their tail feathers to grow. And some of them were wearing the small GLS loggers we attached to their legs last November.

We actually managed to get two of these GLS birds and read out the data the loggers had recorded so far. These will allow us to determine where the birds have spent the past few weeks while away from the fjord.

However, first we had to get them out of their moulting abodes which usually involves squeezing into tiny holes under rocks.

And more often than not all this effort was for nothing and we were left with staring at piles of shed feathers rather than penguins that wanted to volunteer carrying our expensive satellite trackers through their winter migration.

Eventually, four tawaki were fitted with trackers that will broadcasted the penguins’ positions in near realtime via a satellite feed over the coming months. The devices will be recovered in July or August.

After a pleasant, I mean truly awful, day in the Harrison Cove bush it we returned to the mainland in the late afternoon. Our work here is done for the next few months.

By now, the majority of tawaki have returned to the New Zealand mainland to go through their annual moult. Many of the birds return to their breeding colonies to hang out with their partners while they patiently wait for last year’s feathers to be replaced with a flash new plumage.

However, many young birds and non-breeders that don’t have a partner or nest site to return to, make landfall wherever it suits them best.

For example, last year of the five penguins we managed to track throughout their pre-moult journey, only three came back to Gorge River. The other two decided to enjoy a change of scenery and went through their moult in Dusky and Sutherland Sound, respectively.

Admittedly, that’s still very fiordlandish. So how about this guy who was spotted by Alyssa Sutton at Birdlings Flat on the southern end of Bank Peninsula, Christchurch?

A (presumably) moulting tawaki at Birdlings Flat, Banks Peninsula

At a first glance, it appears that the bird may have taken the wrong turn and ended up on the wrong side of New Zealand’s South Island. In fact, in the past, tawaki found moulting on Banks Peninsula have been picked up by well-meaning people who then shipped the birds over to the West Coast by road because the penguins “clearly did not belong here”.

But who are we to judge where tawaki belong? These birds can travel 6,000 kilometres in 8-10 weeks, so that a tawaki could circumnavigate all of New Zealand in half that time. Tawaki moulting along the Otago coast line is perfectly normal; they are even trying to breed there (http://bit.ly/2DXC6kE). And the Banks Peninsula is not that much further.

The ocean around the southern half of New Zealand’s South Island is dominated by the Southland current which flows down the West Coast, around Stewart Island and then up the Southland and Otago coast towards the Banks Peninsula. It is a very productive area that many seabird species forage in. As such it makes a lot of sense for tawaki outside of the breeding season to make the most of these productive waters.

So if you encounter tawaki anywhere on the South Island’s coasts at this time of the year… it’s where they belong. And unless the birds are severely injured or look terribly thin with the breastbone sticking out (e.g. http://bit.ly/2DKGbFO) – they don’t need our help.

In exactly one month, we’ll be packing our gear for another short trip to Whenua Hou/Codfish Island. David Houston and Thomas Mattern will be flying to the island to find tawaki volunteers that have just finished or are about to finish their moult.

After having tracked the penguins during their journey before the moult last year (check out our blog post about this: https://www.tawaki-project.org/…/the-tawaki-pre-moult-journ…/), we now want to reveal another big secret about the penguins. Where they spend the austral winter and prepare for the next breeding season.

Here we are, then. 2018, which will mark the fifth season of the Tawaki Project.

We have been quiet these past few weeks. The reason for that is that we were ‘out at sea’ with other projects. Of course, so were the penguins. Between mid-November and mid-December, the adult tawaki saw their chicks fledge and then headed off on their pre-moult journeys. Since then, the birds are absent from the mainland.

Well, until yesterday. We received word that the first tawaki have returned from their pre-moult journey.