Sunday 20th December 2015.

​Hello friends and family.
Merry Christmas.

some light for a penguin on its way home.

​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 car park at 7:45 pm on Wednesday.

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 

Guess which of these penguins going fishing is the busy parent.

​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.

Of course we can climb trees!

​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.

Proud parent

​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.

Can you spot the chick?

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
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