Sunday 20th December 2020

The southern Rata bringing Christmas colour and best wishes

Hello friends and family
Best wishes for a happy and healthy holiday season!
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Growing up fast

​After a windy weekend, the weather settled down to summer gloriousness. On Tuesday, the team came and we micro-chipped and took bloods from another 8 penguin chicks. They are all growing up so fast. Some now have time at home alone as the parents both go fishing to feed their growing appetites. The small ones are growing too, and a great reminder of where they have all come from.

An abundance of swallows

​Our Happy Christmas story.
On Tuesday the team came across a juvenile YEP resting near tickle bay. We gave it a health check – weigh 5.4 Kg Okay. Feet and feathers Okay.  It looked just fine, so we recorded its micro-chip number and then released it. When I got home, I found that it was the chick from nest 10.
Last year we came across a nest with cold, abandoned eggs at the Moeraki colony, so being one to not give up on eggs, I put them under a single male sitting on a dummy egg next door. This was only ever going to be a temporary solution, but we were able to continue our monitoring rounds.
Later in the day I came back and both eggs had pipped so I collected them up and took them to the pair at nest 10 that were sitting on dummy eggs too. 48 hours later, they had still not hatched so I broke off some of the shell as the internal membrane had dried out and gone leathery. This one survived! A few days later it contracted Diphtheria and so we treated it for that. A few weeks later we had a plague of ferrets that were eating some of the other chicks, so we collected up all the remaining chicks and hand raised them. They all fledged at the normal time, free from Malaria.
Now chick 10 has returned and looks great. What a buzz for us!

Just hanging out together

On Thursday we went to the Bluffs to erect a penguin fence to stop them going into the bull paddock. While we were there, we saw a small pod of Hector’s dolphins fishing close to shore. We all felt very fortunate to be able to do this work.
Have a great week!
Rosalie
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