Sad news

We had a double fatality yesterday and it reminds us to keep watching over these penguins but the reality is that we can't cure death. On our round we found a female yellow-eyed penguin who was raising a two chicks. She was just dead. No external injuries, she was a good weight - in other words: nothing wrong except she was dead. One adult can raise one chick but not two chicks, so we took one of her chicks into rehab and left the other one with dad. We will be keeping a close eye on him and his chick.
The other sad event was the death of a chick that we had brought into rehab in the morning (different one to the one above). We had marked it with a transponder on Monday and it was ok'ish in terms of weight, but we wanted to reweigh it and it had lost half a kilo. Nothing drastic, it was still 4.2kg and off it went into rehab. It was dead by evening - again nothing apparently wrong with it, it just died.
Life is so precarious and we do our best to diagnose the birds but neither were given off signs of impending death such as wheezing, being super skinny, being injured etc. We still have much to learn but for now we are sad.