The Oamaru Penguins

On the East coat of the New Zealand's south island is a small seaside town with little to make it worth a stop apart from two colonies of penguins. The smaller colony of almost extinct Yellow Eyed Penguins is watched over and cared for by an enthusiast, Denis Dove.


Denis has been working with penguins for many years, initially with the Blue Penguin Colony, where he established and managed an organisation, set up to conserve the penguin colony while making the birds accessible to the public. Having retired from that job he spends his retirement doing what he can for the much smaller group of Yellow eyed Penguins. He gave us a short introduction to the workings of the penguin year and then took us along a cliff path into the middle of the colony.


Perched half way up the beach cliff is one family group of penguins in a nesting box.

This is the only box in the colony this year, but next year Denis will use more as it seems to make things a little easier for the birds. This year there were seventeen chicks that successfully hatched, but after a bad storm two nests were washed away and four chicks were lost. With so few birds in the colony, they need a little help if they are to survive.

We were amazed to see the birds scaling this cliff and to see how fast they were doing it.

The other colony is much larger with several hundred Blue or Fairy Penguins nesting this year. Blue Penguins are special because they are tiny weighing in at only one kilogramme when full grown, reaching about thirty centimetres high.

We watched about a hundred of them come ashore, meet and greet friends they had not seen for some time or maybe just to recount the adventures of the days twenty five kilometre fishing trip. Some feat for a tiny bird!

We were not allowed to photograph the birds as the flashes and infra-red rangefinder lights upset the birds but you can find out about the colony at www.penguins.co.nz.