Yellow-eyed Penguins at Te Rere

Yellow-eyed Penguins at Te Rere Penguin Reserve.

By Helen Bain.

After crawling on our hands and knees through dense scrub and fern for what seems like hours, the smell of penguin is getting stronger.

In fact it is getting distinctly whiffy – a particularly malodorous bouquet of fish, faeces and some indescribable stink like no other – suggesting our quarry is close at hand.

I have joined Te Rere Scientific Reserve caretaker Fergus Sutherland and Southern Institute of Technology researcher Jacob Dexter on a search of the 60-hectare reserve in Southland for nest sites of rare yellow-eyed penguins.

The penguins make their nests under logs or thick vegetation a surprising distance from the shore, and finding their well-hidden homes is challenging in the steep terrain and dense foliage. Making like a penguin and tunnelling through the undergrowth is often the only way to find them.

Finally, just as the stink becomes overpowering, Fergus spots them: an adult yellow-eyed penguin and its fluffy gray chick, huddled together in a dark hollow underneath a fallen tree. They peer out, apparently not unduly alarmed by the trio of humans that has just intruded on their domestic arrangements.

‘It’s a nice fat one,’ Fergus says of the chick’s condition, and writes down the observation in his notebook. Jacob plots the exact location of the nest using his GPS to mark it on a map. Finding it again will at least be a bit easier next time.

Fergus and Jacob put up with the mud, the smell, the sore knees and the scrapes and scratches because they are keen to see how this year’s crop of penguin chicks is doing.

For the last 25 years, a team of volunteers at Te Rere has worked to protect these unique penguins. Till the 1970s the penguins had come ashore on the rocks here and nested in relative safety in the dense forest that reached right down to the shore, but their continued survival was threatened when a former landowner began clearing the forest.

In the early 1980s Southland Forest & Bird got agreement of the farmer to fence off the area where the penguins nested, and in 1988 Forest & Bird bought the land and established the Te Rere penguin reserve.

Numbers had built up to 100 adult birds when in February 1995 a fire swept through the reserve, killing more than 60 – a devastating loss to the breeding colony, and a serious blow for a species which numbers just 3500 globally.

Penguin numbers have slowly rebuilt in the decade since the fire, with 18 nest sites found last year and about 30 penguins. But their still precarious situation means Fergus is still anxious about how well they are faring this season.

The penguins nest from October to March, and the last time he checked the nests they held eggs. Today he is hoping they will have hatched into healthy chicks.

The morning’s search brings some cause for concern (apart from sore knees). Yellow-eyed penguins are unusual among penguins because they hatch and raise two chicks. Other penguins sometimes hatch two eggs, but usually leave the weaker chick to die. Yellow-eyed penguins do their best to make sure both their chicks survive.

Yellow-eyed penguin facts

* Unique to New Zealand, Yellow-eyed penguins ( Megadyptes antipodes) are the world’s rarest penguin, and are classified by the Department of Conservation as ‘nationally vulnerable’. Their mainland population is estimated at 450 pairs.
* The adult birds are 65-68cm tall and weigh 5-8kg. They are slate grey with a blue back and have distinctive yellow eyes and yellow ‘headband’.
* Yellow-eyed penguins lay two eggs in September-October and rear two chicks. One parent remains to guard the chicks while the other goes out to sea to bring back food to the nest.
* Their Maori name, hoiho, means ‘noise shouter’ because of their shrill call.
* Hoiho are found mainly in the sub-Antarctic Auckland and Campbell Islands, and on the south-east coast of the South Island, and on Stewart Island.
* Although Te Rere Reserve is not open to the public, anyone is welcome to join Forest & Bird’s regular working days and penguin counts at Te Rere. However, only six of the 10 nests we find are occupied. Many have just a solitary chick instead of the hoped-for pair. Most worryingly, in one nest we find a dead chick. There is no sign of injury that would indicate it has been killed by a predator, like the stoat and two rats we found in baited traps earlier in the day. The dead chick’s small size and lack of fat suggests its parents might have abandoned the nest, or been killed and were unable to return to feed the chick, and it starved to death.

‘Poor little fella,’ Fergus says and picks up the small corpse to take home and store in his freezer till an autopsy can determine the cause of death.

To Fergus’ relief, when we continue the hunt for nests in the afternoon, our search finds nest after nest containing two plump chicks each. Fergus even finds a whole new nest that he wasn’t previously aware of and his spirits lift.

While some of the nests are occupied year after year, sometimes the penguins abandon what seemed like a perfectly good nest and don’t use it again the next year. Fergus sometimes helps by making home improvements – a piece of his old waterbed helps make one nest’s roof waterproof.

Fergus laughs at how little Forest & Bird knew about penguins when they first began their rescue efforts. Like the time they didn’t realise they had set up camp in the middle of the penguin equivalent of State Highway 1.



‘We were sitting in our campsite cooking our evening meal and we saw increasing numbers of penguins coming out of the sea and just standing there looking at us. After a while we came to the realisation that they were waiting for us to get out of their way, so we did, and a rush of about 20 of them came charging through our campsite and up to their nests.’

The volunteers also realised that the fence built to enclose the penguin nests didn’t cover anything like a big enough area – penguins had to squeeze under it to reach their nests – so Forest & Bird negotiated to buy a larger piece of land from current landowner Maurice Yorke to increase the size of the reserve.

The most disastrous setback was the fire. After a long spell without rain the area was tinder dry and a strong wind fanned flames that spread from a nearby burn-off – there was no way of saving the penguins’ nests. Many of the penguins were at sea at the time of the fire but came ashore and walked across the hot ashes and embers and were burnt. This may sound like stupid behaviour but penguins have been coming ashore here for about 6000 years, and force of habit isn’t easily changed. More than 60 dead penguins were found afterwards.

Despite that heartbreaking disaster, the volunteers continued their work – which was more urgent than ever after the fire reduced penguin numbers to little more than 20 and seriously disrupted breeding among the survivors.

As a result of regular planting days, tall native shrubs and trees – flaxes, hebes, pittosporums, tree fuchsia and other ‘toughies’ – now grow over much of the reserve where a decade ago there was just smouldering ashes. The dead trunks of the large podocarps still stand as a reminder of the 1995 fire, and firebreaks are maintained to avoid further disasters.

A constant vigil against introduced pests – mainly possums, rats and stoats – is maintained with traps and poison bait. If left unchecked, predators would make easy meals from the penguins’ nests, and possums would destroy the new planting. Fergus has long-term hopes of building a predator-proof fence around the reserve to provide more substantial protection for the penguins and other native species here.

Disease such as diphtheria also remains a risk, and human-induced climate change has the potential to wipe out the penguins with rising sea levels, intensification of storms and increasing temperatures that stress nesting penguins, and could deplete their food supply at sea.

‘But I’m an optimist – you just keep going,’ Fergus says. He expects that in another 10 years’ time, replanting will have recovered the whole reserve and the penguin population will be greatly increased.

‘I think we have tonnes of habitat now and we are waiting for some good breeding years like we had in the early 1990s when numbers increased quite rapidly. I think we can start to feel a little more secure.’

Chairman of Te Rere advisory committee and Forest & Bird co-ordinator for Te Rere, Brian Rance, says restoring the reserve and penguin numbers after the fire has been a hard struggle, but one that is starting to pay off.

However he says it is disappointing that while penguin numbers climbed back to about 20 pairs a few years after the fire, they have not climbed much higher since, and he would like to see the population recover further.

‘They are a tough, resilient bird and they seem to be able to bounce back from disaster, but threats are always there and I would feel a lot safer if their numbers were higher. But we have come a long way and I hope that will continue.’

Story and pix courtesy of Wildlife Extra @

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/world/yellow-eyed.html