This group of Little Penguins (also known as Fairy Penguins or
sometimes Blue Penguins) are being taken care of at a rescue center on
Penguin Island. By Ken and Nyetta/Flickr/sa-2.0
By AFP
09/12/2012
From the foaming wake of a Sydney ferry a small, grey figure sails
towards the suburban Manly beachfront, landing belly-first on a
closely-guarded strip of sand.
Stickybeak
the penguin stands, shakes himself free of water and — after a furtive
glance at the tourists gathered to watch his twilight return to the
city’s most famous bird nest — waddles off under the wharf to his brood.
“He’s
got a mansion under there,” joked chief penguin warden Angelika
Treichler, who stood guard behind a strip of safety cones and padlocked
gates guaranteeing the bird free passage to his nest.
“He used to live next door, but now he’s taken over the whole area.”
Stickybeak,
his partner Mrs Silverwing and their two chicks are the last remaining
Little Penguins living under the Manly wharf, a bustling area for
commuters and tourists.
Also known as fairy penguins or blue
penguins the Little Penguin — the smallest species of their kind — grow
to just 33 centimetres (13 inches) tall and can live for up to 20 years.
There
are another 60 or so breeding pairs living in the nearby North Head
National Park, a rugged wildlife preserve where Sydney Harbour meets the
Pacific Ocean, but Stickybeak is a thoroughly metropolitan bird.
He
joins hundreds of commuters taking the evening ferry from the city’s
bustling centre back to the beach, slipping into its wake to cruise
home, and has been known to waddle over drunks passed out on his
doorstep.
Treichler, a retired schoolteacher from Germany, has
been watching him since volunteer patrols of the beach began when the
colony was declared endangered in 2002 and has recorded his many
adventures in the wardens’ log book.
“He came up here once, up the
steps, walked across the road and waddled into the Flamenco Club.
Luckily one of the guests knew him, knew he lived here and put his
jacket over him and carried him out,” she told AFP.
“He used to
sit for hours there on the boardwalk and sing very loudly, and look up
whether we were listening, and when I would call him he’d come running
out from under the wharf and cluck back at me.”
Conservationists
have worked hard to nurse penguin numbers back to health over the past
decade, using sniffer dogs to hunt out foxes in the park and deploying
wardens to educate locals about the dangers of dogs and garbage.
Ecologist
Lisa O’Neill tags every penguin with a microchip once they’re old
enough to leave the nest, and says only 10 percent typically survive the
transition to the harbour, with predators always lurking and speedboat
strikes common.
There have been concerted efforts to move the
penguins out of more urban areas — some nest under residential homes
around the harbour — but success has been mixed with the deeply
territorial creatures.
Stickybeak and Mrs Silverwing — his
step-mother — were taken across to Store Beach in the national park in
an attempt to resettle them after a stint in hospital but Treichler said
they “came straight back here” to the wharf.
Their unorthodox
romance blossomed in the rehabilitation unit of the city zoo, where Mrs
Silverwing was mourning the death of her husband and Stickybeak was
recovering from a boat strike accident that had killed his own partner.
They
are the last of five pairs that once lived under the wharf, and Little
Penguin coordinator with the National Parks and Wildlife Service,
Melanie Tyas, said it was a double-edged sword.
“In some ways I
think it’d be great if we had more penguins under here, but then on the
other hand you’ve got that (factor of) — well it’s one or two, it’s so
rare that it’s such a special experience to see them,” she said.
The
birds hunt the length and breadth of Sydney Harbour, foraging for fish,
squid and other marine animals, and O’Neill said it was rare to find a
penguin colony on the mainland, let alone one in an urban area.
“It’s just spectacular, it’s an amazing privilege to have the birds so close to an area like this,” she said.
“It’s a wonderful thing to have so close to the city, we’re really lucky.”
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