This Week's Pencognito!

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Stickybeak and the penguins of Sydney

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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Penguin bubble bath on show

TALIA SHADWELL

13/09/2012

 

Oil spill penguins get a cleanup at Massey Wildlife Centre.

all images---TAYLOR GILES/Fairfax 

 

 

 (MORE IMAGES AT WEBSITE)

TALIA SHADWELL 
9/13/2012
 
Oil spill penguins get a cleanup at Massey Wildlife Centre. A trio of bewildered penguins have been whisked from Napier to Palmerston North for a very public bubble bath.
The three little blue penguins were the only known casualties of last Friday's diesel spill in Napier Harbour.

A moored fishing boat partly sank on Friday evening, spilling about 1500 litres of its fuel tank's diesel into the sea.
Hawke's Bay wildlife rescuers picked up six penguins, of which three were determined to be in need of urgent attention as they were coated in a toxic diesel slick.

The birds were dispatched to Massey University's Palmerston North-based national Oiled Wildlife Response team for a scrubbing, to the delight of their young audience yesterday.
Massey wildlife technician Pauline Conayne had spent the past two school terms educating Tiritea School pupils about the Wildlife Centre's animal patients.

She and national wildlife response team co-ordinator Helen McConnell, who both spent time in Tauranga helping the animal casualties of the Rena oil spill at Astrolabe Reef, showed the kids the penguin-scrubbing process.
The audience were not allowed to touch lest the oils on their own hands compromised the birds' delicate feathers.

Tiritea year five pupil Jacob Farrelly, 9, said the children had spent two terms learning about how to clean oiled animals, but this was the first time they had seen it in action.
"We got turkey feathers that we put in golden syrup and Vegemite and we used [special detergent] Dawn to wash it out.
"It took quite a long time just to clean the feathers."

It took almost half an hour per bird to clean off the diesel that would poison their skin and strip their feathers of their waterproof qualities if it wasn't swiftly removed, Ms McConnell said.
The children were entranced as each well-tempered bird squirmed through the bubble bath, fought a little less against a dousing of warm water and eventually conceded defeat as its turn came for a feather-drying session under a giant blowdrying apparatus.

Jacob said the penguins weren't as happy about their rescue as he and his classmates had expected.
"We imagined they would be all calm and that, but we now know that they really, really hate it."
Last year the school raised $1000 towards the care of the wildlife centre's patients, an amount the children hoped to match this year.

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Meet the penguins at the NEW Zoo in WI

   Meet the penguins at the NEW Zoo

Updated: Wednesday, 12 Sep 2012

SUAMICO - The NEW Zoo wants you to support conservation efforts and meet the penguins up-close and personal.
Those who purchase the 2012 Fall Adoption Package will be invited to attend a special "Meet the Penguins" event on dates in November, December, and January.
The experience will give adopters a behind-the-scenes look at the penguin exhibit and allow them to meet the NEW Zoo penguins.
Any animal can be adopted to qualify for the package. The cost is $60 for zoo pass members and $75 for non-zoo pass members.

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Mystery slick oils more penguins

September 12 2012
By Melanie Gosling

INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPERS

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Volunteers at SANCOB cleaning penguins that were caught in the oil slick that leaked from the Seli 1 after heavy storms over the weekend. Picture: Leon Lestrade

Cape Town - Oiled penguins are rolling in – but the surveillance aircraft cannot pinpoint any oil slick.

It is thought the oil must be coming from the wreck of the Seli 1, but in small amounts not visible from the aircraft.

As the number of oiled birds continues to rise, experts believe many more birds have died at sea. At least two heavily oiled penguins have been found dead on Robben Island.

Of the 219 oiled birds found since the beginning of the month, 218 are endangered African penguins.

Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (Sanccob) head Venessa Strauss said on Tuesday: “They’re still catching them on Robben Island, freshly oiled. There is no indication of where the oil is coming from. I can’t say for certain the Seli 1 is still leaking, but I can say there is still oil in the ocean. I think it probably is from the Seli, but in small amounts so you can’t see it from the air. The penguins are having a tough time.”

The Environment Department’s surveillance aircraft K9 flew over the sea every day last week and did not report any oil slicks. Strauss said the oiled penguins that were coming in were between 10 percent and 40 percent covered in oil.

“We haven’t seen any birds 100 percent oiled except those two dead birds. I think this shows that the ones that are completely covered don’t make it back to land. They die at sea.” This indicated that the real number of birds affected by the oil slick was probably far higher.

The wrecked Seli 1 caused an extensive oil slick in Table Bay when remnants of fuel from its submerged tanks leaked out in a storm on September 1, polluting the Table Bay coastline up to Dolphin Beach.

Table Bay is one of the main feeding grounds for seabirds from Robben Island and the West Coast National Park.

Nola Parsons, the foundation’s vet, led a team of volunteers and researchers on Robben Island over the weekend to search for oiled birds and identify chicks that had been abandoned because their parents were oiled.

Oiled birds lose their natural waterproofing, so don’t go to sea and eventually starve.

“Checking birds in the colony is time-consuming and takes many people to check every bush and burrow. We are a little bruised and battered with some sore bodies, but happy that we were able to help the dedicated researchers that have been doing this all week,” Parsons said.

In 2010 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red Data list classified the African penguin as endangered because populations were rapidly declining. Just seven islands support 80 percent of the global population. The union attributes the penguins’ decline to food shortages, both because of use of large amounts of fish caught commercially and the eastward shift of their main food sources of anchovy and sardines.

It described penguin deaths from oil spills as a serious threat, adding that there had been “a dramatic increase in the number of oiled birds since 1990”. - Cape Times

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Hotel for penguins opens in South Africa

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

A new five-star hotel is open offering luxury swimming pools and all-you-can-eat fish dinners, but it's for penguins only.

The hotel is located in South Africa. It's part of the country's efforts to save the African penguin from extinction.
Hotel workers take care of birds that may have medical conditions and get them ready to be released back into the wild. The hotel is not only about saving penguins, but also about helping to preserve marine life.

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Fort Wayne Children's Zoo's shy little penguin chick is growing up

By Cheryl Piropato for The News-Sentinel

Thursday, September 13, 2012 

The tiny ball of fluff that hatched in the penguin house on June 26 is tiny no more. That black-footed penguin chick is almost the same size as an adult penguin and weighs nearly 6 pounds!

Spend a few minutes with the chick at feeding time, and you'll soon figure out her strategy for bulking up: eat lots of fish. During our afternoon photo session, the chick, who blood tests recently revealed as a female, devoured seven fish in a matter of minutes.

The chick, named Ila, seemed to enjoy snuggling against Central Zoo Area Manager Shelley Scherer's leg.

"This chick is much more shy than other chicks we have raised," says Scherer said.
Ila currently lives behind the scenes at the zoo, where she is being hand-fed by zookeepers. Scherer explains that when Ila sheds all her downy feathers in a few weeks, she'll be introduced to the entire penguin flock. Depending on how the introductions go, Ila could be in the exhibit before the end of the season.

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Penguin had neck wounds: Manly Council to review signage

13 Sep 12 by Boel Eriksson

MANLY Council will review signage regarding dogs on leashes at Little Manly after a penguin was found dead with neck wounds on Sunday
Manly resident Sara Davies discovered the dead female penguin at the north end of the beach on a rock.
Dogs are only allowed on the beach if they are on a leash.
"It had scratches and grazes on its neck, she said.
"I felt really sad."
She called Penguin Protectors co-ordinator Angelika Treichler, who took it to Taronga Zoo for an autopsy.
Ms Treichler said the zoo's autopsy results showed that it was female and had been dead for at least three days.
"It was too difficult to determine the initial cause of death but a dog had certainly played with it," she said.
A male penguin was seen in a nest in a nearby rock crevice with a chick, believed to be the dead penguin's.
"When we got there, we saw that the chick was too young to be left alone and will probably starve because the remaining parent cannot go foraging to feed it," Ms Treichler said.
Mrs Davies and Ms Treichler will monitor the penguin chick and its father over the next few days, hoping it will survive without its mother.

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Important Bird Area Designation For South Georgia

South Georgia Newsletter, August 2012

South Georgia has been designated an Important Bird Area (IBA) as part of the BirdLife programme to identify, protect and manage sites that are significant for the long-term viability of bird populations.

South Georgia is estimated to have more than 100 million individual seabirds based on the island and is described in the journal ‘British Birds’ as “one of the world's most important seabird islands.”

The designation of South Georgia as an IBA in ‘British Birds’ came in a paper by Andy Clarke (BAS) and colleagues.

IBAs are places of international significance for the conservation of birds and biodiversity and are recognised world-wide as practical tools for conservation. An IBA must be a distinct area amenable to practical conservation action. The IBA programme has identified more than 10,000 sites world-wide that form a network of areas essential to ensure the survival of bird species across their ranges.

South Georgia has 29 species of breeding bird, and is the world's most important breeding site for six species: macaroni penguin (1,000,000 breeding pairs); grey-headed albatross (77,436 breeding pairs); northern giant petrel (4,310 breeding pairs); Antarctic prion (22,000,000 breeding pairs); white-chinned petrel (2,000,000 breeding pairs); and the common diving petrel (3,800,000 breeding pairs). It is also probably a very important breeding area for seven others bird species: king penguin; gentoo penguin; wandering albatross; black-browed albatross; southern giant petrel; black-bellied storm-petrels; and the South Georgia diving petrel.

According to the abstract for the new paper, “Several of these species are globally threatened or near-threatened, which enhances the importance of South Georgia and emphasises the need for action to improve the conservation status of its birds.” South Georgia is currently classified as a single IBA but further research may lead to it being considered as several distinct IBAs.

Despite currently being home to 100 million birds, it would have been home to a vast number more before the introduction of rats. A programme of rodent eradication through the South Georgia Heritage Trust’s (SGHT) Habitat Restoration Programme was started in the summer of 2010/11 and is due to continue for the next two summer seasons.

Birds on South Georgia currently face various threats including rodents, climate change and incidental mortality in less well managed fisheries outside the SG zone. Incidental bird mortality in the South Georgia fisheries is almost nil, but South Georgia albatrosses and petrels are still killed in large numbers in more distant fisheries.

Impact on bird populations by rodents and fisheries mortalities can still be tackled but, as the paper’s abstract states, “there is probably little that can be done to mitigate the effects of climate change."

For more facts and figures about the astounding numbers of breeding birds on South Georgia visit BirdLife’s website here.

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Image of the Day

260, a photo by jones_adrian1 on Flickr.

"I haz a fishie"

Image of the Day

King Penguin Photos by Bill Klipp, a photo by Bill Klipp on Flickr.

Image of the Day

Penguin, a photo by Banuta KT on Flickr.

'Huge rewards' from penguin conservation

By Rebecca Fox on Tue, 11 Sep 2012

The Regions: Otago | Conservation

Moira Parker checks on the progress of plants at the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust nursery. Photo by Peter McIntosh.

Otago Peninsula, with all its flora and fauna, is very special to Moira Parker. Rebecca Fox asks this year's winner of the Coastal Otago Conservation Award about her passion for conservation work.  

What is it about the projects you are involved in that got you interested and continues to interest you?
 
I've always had a strong interest in natural history and a consequence has been protecting bush remnants as a member of Save The Otago Peninsula Inc (STOP) and helping set up the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust. I also have a feeling that we can do more for the flora and fauna of the Otago Peninsula.

Lots of aspects maintain my interest, especially the other people who are involved. I particularly enjoy increasing my knowledge of native plants and taking part in regular bird-monitoring for the Otago Peninsula Biodiversity Group.

How are the projects you're involved in benefiting conservation?
The acquisition of land at Okia and Tavora by the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust has not only benefited the yellow-eyed penguin but also other species of plants and animals. Riparian planting and dune restoration, plus extensive natural regeneration, have greatly enhanced biodiversity.

What do you get out of your work in conservation?
There are huge rewards in seeing the progress of some earlier conservation initiatives.
The Peninsula bush remnants covenanted in the 1980s and 1990s and the two Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust purchases; Okia Reserve purchased in 1991 and Tavora Reserve in 1993. I get a lot of pleasure from the achievements of the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust plant nursery. And, every day I appreciate 19 years of forest regeneration on the QE2-covenanted property at Varleys Hill, jointly owned with my husband.

What challenges do you face and how have you overcome them?
Lack of understanding of the damage that some naturalised garden plants can do. For example, Darwin's barberry infiltrates and takes over native bush. Banana passion fruit and Bomarea are both very destructive vines.
Weed control requires sympathetic landowners providing access on to private land, funds for herbicide and assistance from groups such as the Doc Conservation Corps and Dunedin City Council Task Force Green.
Grant applications and writing submissions are a chore, but essential for many conservation activities.

What would you like to do in the future, through conservation?
The formation by local landowners of the Otago Peninsula Biodiversity Group "pest-free peninsula" is a very exciting development. I hope to continue my involvement with the first stage of the project, which is to reduce possums to negligible levels. My particular interest is the monitoring of any changes in vegetation, bird numbers and rodents that may result from reduced possum numbers.
Secondly, the purchase by the Dunedin City Council of the spectacular Akapatiki/Harbour Cone block is fantastic. So far, the planting and weed control have been entirely a community effort and as a member of STOP, I look forward to working more closely with the city council.
Harbour Cone offers great opportunities for revegetation of unstable hill slopes and enhancement of the creeks. And the public walking tracks allow people to see at first hand what is happening.

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