Hello friends and family Happy New Year! I am looking forward to 2016, confident that it will be better for the penguins than 2015. El Nino is kinder for the wildlife on this coast than La Nina and in that I have hope. The biggest setback this year was the death of 10 of our breeding females here at Katiki and 4 at Okahau point. Many of our mothers have been in rehabilitation and it is easy to imagine that the species lacks resilience, but when we add human disturbance on top of habitat damage it has consequences that are disastrous for penguins. During the winter we made the hard call that, as no controls were likely to be placed upon the tourists here, we would have to restrict the range of the penguins and so built an internal fence to keep the penguins away from the people. There is little else that we can do here so we need to move our focus to Okahau Point in the hope of giving the penguins a better chance of survival in the future. Everywhere else that people have been given uncontrolled access to Yellow-eyed penguin colonies, the penguins are dying out even faster than here. I have harvested the Broad beans and the cherries are beginning to ripen. The glorious sunny days are a delight, but I have only just put the pumpkins in the ground, waiting for the warm weather. Elaine and I have started our beach searches. We cannot help sick and injured penguins if we don’t find them in time. Many of the sea birds have babies and the gulls in particular are not keen to see us. The noise is amazing! Chris came up for Xmas and we enjoyed some wild pork given to me by my nephew Peter. It was delicious! Gary, the ex-lighthouse maintenance man called in with some photos. He now works in China and commutes from Dunedin. The seal breeding area is crawling with fur seal pups. Everywhere I looked there was another one. They are playing in the rock pools when it gets hot, very cute and noisy too!
Have a great week! Rosalie Hello friends and family. Merry Christmas. I hope you are able to have an enjoyable break from work and relax, enjoy the outdoors and keep up that calorie intake! If you get some unwanted gifts, sell them online and donate the proceeds to the penguins – win –win! The chicks continue to grow and are mostly over 2Kg now, some maybe as much as 4Kg. Kathryn the vet came and checked out our patient who is now back in the ocean. The first lot of salmon has arrived and so we are set for the busy season which begins next month. We got 20mm of rain this week so it counts as a wet one. The ODT article about the Labour Party visit was published You may have read in the paper about the sad state of the Yellow-eyed penguin population. It is another high mortality year for the chicks. DOC once again, identify uncontrolled tourism as a major threat to the penguins but the visitors continue to pour in here all day, every day. It is taking me an hour to clear the reserve in the evenings after 7:30pm and visitors keep arriving up until 9:30pm, hoping to sneak in – and some of them do. I am doing my best. Chris came on Friday and we went to Oamaru to meet with Philippa to discuss marine protection for the penguins. We then went on to visit Janice and wish her a merry Christmas. On Saturday morning – disaster!!! The coffee pod machine broke. Woe is us! I went to Hampden to get some plunger coffee to tide us over to a fixed machine. Doing the monitoring rounds was a pleasure as all of the chicks are doing well. They are beginning to come out of their nest boxes so are easy to spot at a distance – they often do not even see us as we size them up to make sure that they are fit and healthy. Have a great week! Rosalie Hello friends and family. We have enjoyed some summer weather this week which has made being out and about a real pleasure. Paul and Jen came to stay on Tuesday and spent their visit fixing things and helping out. I felt very relieved as the list of things to do got shorter and jobs got ticked off. Thank you both! We have our first hospital patient – a non-breeding adult male had his feet slashed on Wednesday and he is now in care, being treated until he is fit to go back to sea. I contacted NZ King Salmon and they are going to sponsor our fish this season which is just fantastic. The chicks have passed the high-risk phase and are now beginning to leave their nest boxes and move about near their nests. It can be worrying to come to a nest box and find it empty, but a quick search nearby usually locates the chicks with a guarding parent. The penguin ID machine is now set up in the colony to let us know which penguins are coming and going. It will take some time to get all of the elements working properly, but we have taken a huge step forward getting it down the hill. I now have a working iPhone 6+ and am very pleased with it. I will share some photos in this blog soon. Last night I went to Doug’s birthday party in the Moeraki Hall. It was fabulous with delicious food and plenty to drink. I should get out more often, and thus begins my New Year’s resolution list! Have a great week!
Rosalie Hello friends and family We had no chicks die this week. Thank goodness! I am still treating one chick but the rest have completed their course of antibiotics and are starting to grow. The diphtheria does knock them about quite badly as all of their energy goes into fighting the disease and they don’t grow. In a month or so, they will have all caught up, but in the meantime, they are on the right track. I have treated 34 chicks and 8 died. November is a difficult month for Yellow-eyed penguin carers. The weather has been hot and dry, with enough wind to evaporate the 45mm of rain that we did get. This means watering our small trees which is heavy work to be doing in the heat. The up side is being outside, surrounded by stunning Cabbage trees and flax, enjoying the sweet perfume and admiring the bees as they go about their work. Chris came and stayed for a few days and he has been grubbing thistles and repairing fences. I have work to do repairing some tree circles that the rabbits can currently get under. When they do, they ring-bark the trees and kill them. It is a constant challenge to keep one step ahead of the rabbits! On Friday, David Clarke, our local Labour Party representative came to visit with Ruth Dyson, the Labour Party spokesperson for Conservation. Our message to them was that Yellow-eyed penguins are in danger of extinction on the South Island and more resources are needed to prevent this. The department of conservation has updated its website and noted that there are fewer than 200 nests this season. Surely this rates a threat status more than ‘nationally vulnerable’. Why do we as New Zealanders practice conservation brinkmanship like this? Have a great week!
Rosalie Hello friends and family. The week has been another challenging one. 4 chicks at Okahau point went missing and a 5th has wounds on both feet. I put out trail cameras and think the culprit may be a stoat. In the meantime, the youngest chicks got Diphtheria and died. Some of the chicks are taking a while to get over their infection and so I am feeding them fish in the mornings when their tummies are empty. Monday was a nice day so I checked the bees. With the colder days, leaving them for 3 weeks worked out OK and they are all fine. Richard says to not expect honey until Christmas time. Temperatures during the week were very warm – high twenties and sunny. Great for the cruise ships that came to Dunedin and then sent busloads of people here. Those visitors do come during the day and so cause no problems On Friday we got 20mm of rain, thank goodness. It was an inside day and I managed to do very little. A nice change all round. Daniel, Elaine and Hiltrun all visited on Saturday. Daniel came with Hiltrun and I on the monitoring rounds and we found another wandering chick – sure enough it had Diphtheria but as it is a bit older, its chances of survival are higher than the tiny chicks. November is almost over and the stress of chick deaths will soon be behind us. Currently we have 24 chicks at Okahau Point and 32 here. Have a great week!
Rosalie |
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