Sunday 31st December 2023 Hello friends and family, Happy New Year 2023 brought with it some highs and some lows. As always, when working with awesome creatures they can surprise you. On Tuesday we weighed the nest 35 chicks and they had put on over 1Kg each (25%+). There are 3 adults feeding them. When Mrs 6 stopped coming home, we uplifted the 2 chicks that were failing to thrive and brought them into care. Mr 6 journeyed up the hill, past six other nests to nest 35. The occupants there had moved up the hill from nest 6 last season when they were his neighbours. There was blood! Somehow the 3 adults have come to an arrangement and the 2 chicks are thriving! We also have 2 males and 1 female attending nest 49 but they have been doing that all season. Their chick is making normal weight gains. Jan and Robbie did the monitoring round on Thursday while I went to Dunedin to pick up Dan. By evening he had sorted out my technical problems and I can now stream the internet onto my TV! On Friday we went to the Bluffs to install a mosquito trap and will put some out in these reserves. I hold great hopes for 2024. That all 60 of our chicks survive and we have more nests in the new season. As the number of nests decline, our efforts increase. The team has stepped up this year, motivated by care for our environment, love of our penguins and joy in self-actualization. I am proud of the team and our results. Happy New Year
Rosalie Hello friends and family. Merry Christmas. It has warmed up here in the south. I enjoy getting up in the morning when it is warm, and no jacket is needed. On Tuesday we weighed the chicks down the hill and 2/3 of them now weigh more than 3kg. We let the 2 adults go and later got blood results that one of them tested positive for Malaria. I went down the hill on Wednesday to look for it and found 5 penguins all having a party on the beach! In the evening, Hiltrun called in a penguin on Katiki Beach and Murray and Bronwyn caught it. It is in a very sorry state and will need a while to recover. It too has Malaria, but it will get treated. On Thursday we weighed the chicks in the Moeraki colony. They are all making good progress. On some days, both parents go fishing and leave the chicks hidden at home. It can take a while to find them as they stay very still and quiet, and of course, they are still brown and fluffy, so they blend in. If you have forgotten someone this gift giving season, you could always give them a subscription to our Live cam (Penguin Rescue on YouTube) which now has sound! Have a great week!
Rosalie Hello friends and family, I enjoyed a quiet start to the week and was surprized to get 2 calls about stray penguins on Tuesday morning. The team gathered for the weekly weigh in for chicks here at the lighthouse and all of them had put on weight. Our fortunes changed when we found a dead chick at the Moeraki colony. It was decomposing fast, and it was not easy to confirm the cause of death so we will send it off for an autopsy. Robbie brought some disturbing footage of mosquitoes attacking one of our penguins. This is the first evidence of mosquitoes here, other than Malaria in the penguins. They arrived on the penguin at about 10:00 pm and then left again about midnight. As the week progressed and the fish did not arrive, anxiety levels rose. This fish was coming from Tauranga using a different distributor and so delivery was an unknown. On Thursday we found another dead chick here in the morning and Jan took it south for autopsy. The rest are making good progress. Then, in the afternoon, relief – the fish arrived! I took delivery of 150 boxes of sardines. They will be just right for feeding the penguins. We squeezed all but 25 boxes into our freezers and then I took those to Fleur’s who had agreed to store them for us. Her support over the years has been generous. On Friday Elaine and I set off for Dunedin to meet with Bruce and then have a team meeting about Avian Malaria. After lunch we picked up our 2 injured and recovering penguins from the wildlife hospital and got home at about 3pm. Hiltrun did the monitoring rounds yesterday.
Have a great week, Rosalie Hello friends and family. All was ticking over nicely at the start of the week until the Tuesday monitoring rounds. The chicks in nest 6 were post guard. (I put a camera on the nest overnight – no adult was recorded coming home to feed the chicks.) We continued and when we got to nest 86, the male was there injured, badly enough to require stitches so we brought him in to go to the wildlife hospital and the chicks in to hand raise. The wonderful man from United Fisheries got back to me. He has sourced a pallet of fish for us which is fantastic. Changes to the MPI regulations have affected the supply of small fish so this was a godsend. We will have our freezer space packed to the limit. Wednesday was Toptip day. These seem to come around so fast. The next one will be next year! On Thursday we picked up the nest 6 chicks as they were losing weight. The next day, there were no adults home at the nest, so they have abandoned it. The rest of the penguins were fine. Robbie took a load of treasures from my shed to be stored at the Bluffs so we can fit another freezer in the shed if needed. On Friday it was time to get a WOF for the car. With the amount of roadworks, it took 50 minutes to get to Oamaru. The traffic seems very heavy these days. Weeding has become the number two job. We have had enough rain for plants to flourish and the grass is over a meter tall.
Have a great week! Rosalie Hello friends and family, It is always a pleasure to get to the end of November and to look forward to the festive season with some degree of control over events. All the surviving chicks bar one, have come back from the Wildlife Hospital and settled into their nests. The parents are doing the grunt work of feeding them each day. They are leaving early and swapping over during the day so both can feed. We had a wonderful surprize on Monday when Murray found another nest at the Bluffs. This puts our total to 40. There was a penguin sitting on two infertile eggs. Hidden away inside a gorse bush, it was a pair we had not seen last season. It now has a chick and a number! Our tally is now 40 nests and 62 chicks. Tuesday was weighing day here at Katiki Point. We weighed 43 chicks and were happy with their weights but not so much with their mums. The mums are scrawny already, some only 4.5kg. this is an early signal that we may need to help with chick raising. Our other weighing day is normally Thursday but this week we had to return the rental car. This meant 2 cars going to Dunedin, so we seized the day, and all went down for our end of November celebration. We visited the OPERA (Otago peninsula environmental restoration alliance) The weather was great and the visit worthwhile. After that we went out to lunch and then home. This meant weigh day was Friday. Elaine, Jan, and I were joined by Amy from Sea World Kelly Tarltons who are our sponsors. The chicks were fine but once again, thin mums. Mrs 130 was only 4.2kgs. I phoned United Fisheries – no sardines in stock! Yesterday my monitoring round revealed an injured chick in front of a nest box. It looked like a predator had dragged it out. It was very stressed and could not stand so it was another trip to the wildlife hospital. Never a dull moment.
Have a great week! Rosalie Hello friends and family, Day by day we are making progress. The chicks are growing and becoming safer. We have had some frights with chicks losing weight and there have been several rushed trips down to the Dunedin Wildlife hospital with tiny scraps of life struggling to breathe. We have naughty chicks and compliant chicks. The always present problem of predators becomes more acute with tiny lives at stake. By the middle of the week, we had 61 chicks here, including one from Green Island, 5 at DWH, including one from Green Island, and a break from the daily trips down to Dunedin. Daily nest rounds are necessary because Diphtheria is still ever present, as is the risk of choking from fish bones. It does get easier each day as the chicks grow. So far, none of the chicks have died here after returning from the wildlife hospital. Outside the nests, we have prolific flowering and growth. The flax bush outside my office window, usually good for 5 or 6, has put up 20 flowering stems. The trees are blooming and there is abundance everywhere. Have a great week!
Rosalie Hello friends and family Another crazy week. The team have all stepped up to do the best for the penguins. Michelle joined us for 3 days. Elaine trained her up on penguin chick travel management when they brought 11 chicks home on Monday and then Michelle did 2 extra days. By Tuesday, all our chicks except for the last, late, nest had been taken down to the hospital. The job switched to bringing chicks home and settling them back into their nests. The parents have all waited patiently on a dummy egg except for one pair who took a short break one afternoon. Their chick came home the next day, so we are keeping a close eye on that nest. We have had another chick die. On Sunday afternoon I took a trip down to the hospital with it as it was gasping. It did not recover. There is a lot of mild diphtheria in the chicks as they return which we are treating, and the chicks seem to recover. On Wednesday the first two of the Green Island chicks came up to be fostered into a nest here. We had space because of infertile eggs. Elaine and I did the chick run on Friday. We brought back the last of the chicks from the Moeraki colony and were still waiting for the last eggs here at Katiki to hatch. They are both pipping, and we expect them to hatch today. As is the pattern, Yellow-eyed penguin chicks are very inventive in finding ways to die. Apart from disease, they can get fish bones stuck in their throats and we have had to save 2 of those cases this week. As each day passes, they get older and stronger. We continue to prioritise their survival. Have a great week!
Rosalie Hello friends and family The roller coaster ride continues. We took chicks down to DWH on Sunday and Monday, bringing the first two back on Monday. They settled well back into their nests and on Tuesday, we had no trip to Dunedin as no chicks were ready in either direction. Of course, that changed when we found two weak chicks in a nest. Tuesday was Amy’s last day and she delivered them on her way south. We were very lucky to have her help as we got our routines established. Thank you, Amy. By Thursday, all the chicks from the Moeraki colony had been uplifted and returns were outnumbering deliveries. We had to split the first chick pair that returned on different days as one chick put on 250g in one day, while the other made no weight gain. At this stage we have a lot of flexibility as most penguins are sitting on dummy eggs. The great news for Thursday was that both chicks at Kawariki Bay are alive. This was the first pair of eggs abandoned. With the use of dummy eggs, we were able to get the parents back incubating and return the real eggs for them to hatch. The other abandoned pair will stay with their foster parents as we have not seen dad again. It was my turn to be the driver down to Dunedin yesterday. Bronwyn and I delivered 4 chicks and brought back 6 chicks. It was a glorious, sunny day and great to be out there. Some of the chicks that we are bringing back have developed mild diphtheria and require a mouthwash. This requires very close monitoring and so the days are getting long. The team are in great spirits, knowing that this is a marathon, not a sprint.
Have a great week! Rosalie |
Archives
April 2024
|