A Trip to Australia and New Zealand
Dunedin - Otago Peninsula
After seeing the sights in Dunedin, a group of us took a bus out to the tip of the Otago Peninsula where we visited a yellow-eyed penguin preserve. The drive took about an hour and passed through beautiful pastoral land with wonderful views out to the ocean. We spent the entire afternoon and were fortunate to see a number of mature and immature penguins as well as a few fur seals. We also learned a lot about penguins.
The rare and endangered Yellow-eyed Penguin (Megadyptes antipodes) is native to New Zealand and is not found anywhere else in the world. The Maori name for the bird is Hoiho. Most are found on the Otago Peninsula and a few nearby islands. Some individuals are thought to live to be twenty years of age, but it is believed that there are only about 4,000 of them in existence.
We visited them during the chick rearing cycle when most of the adult birds were out foraging for food. Their diet is primarily fish and they are thought to travel as much as ten or eleven miles off shore every day to find enough fish, squid, octopus, and cuttlefish to feed their chicks. Unlike many other penguins, the Yellow-eyed penguin does not nest in a colony, but rather seeks to build it's nest in scrub brush close to the sea, but outside the view of any other bird.
The nesting sites that we visited were about a hundred yards inland from a broad beach. The adults usually go out to sea in the early morning and return to feed their chicks in the late afternoon or early evening. Crossing the beach and entering the shallow water just off shore is when they are most vulnerable to a wide variety of land predators, including a number of European introduced species. In the open sea they are vulnerable to seal and shark attack.
