News

Your donation, matched by a generous supporter, will help us understand and respond to threats to West Coast penguins.

Starting right this minute, we are very excited to share this opportunity with you. A very generous donor has offered to match donations up to $5000!  With your help, we can reach $10,000 in donations in the coming weeks.

Donate now

To counterbalance Black Friday, Giving Tuesday was born for the following week.  It's a day to remember and support causes you believe in and we're going to continue it through this season of giving and the summer! Your donation will help us better understand the threats to penguins here on the West Coast and take actions to protect them in 2024. We have a fabulous opportunity to maintain and extend our penguin conservation projects, from research into threats to practical solutions, education and advocacy.

And we need you to make it happen!

Your donation will firstly ensure we monitor penguins, both little blue penguins - kororā, and Fiordland crested penguins - tawaki.  The data we collect is critical in informing what actions we can take, so your donation will also help ensure we take the next steps, whether building penguin protection fences, working with school children or liaising with councils and developers for example. We know that you will feel good about supporting a cause you believe in and value - the work that we do and the penguins we all love.  But did you know that science confirms that? I like to call it the 'joy of giving' and it turns out others call it that too.  Some of the benefits - and joy - of making a donation, small or large, include a greater sense of community and a sense of purpose and fulfilment, a greater happiness and satisfaction, feelings of gratitude, an improved outlook on life and boost your mood!  I have even read that giving lowers levels of inflation!

How to make a donation

There are a few ways you can donate and feel the warmth and joy of giving for penguin conservation. Easiest is via our donation page using a credit card - bish, bash, bosh - thank you! You can also go there to make a donation in memory of someone special. Also easy is a direct bank payment donation.  We just ask that you also email us so we can thank you and send you a receipt. Whether credit card or bank payment, you can of course make it a regular donation if you'd like to keep that joy going! There are donation boxes at New World and J's cafe in Westport and in Hokitika at Moment's in Time/NZ Post, Hokitika Craft Gallery, and the Kiwi Centre.  (Any suggestions for a location in Greymouth gratefully received!) And you could use any of these to make a donation on behalf of someone as a gift, Christmas or otherwise.  We have a couple of cards you can print out to let them know. Download - Christmas Penguin - donation in lieu of gift card Download - Penguin love donation in lieu of gift card                              

Westland Petrel/Tāiko chicks fledge from November to January. Their first flight can be a tough one, as they are inexperienced fliers, and can become disorientated by bright lights and poor weather conditions. Adult birds are also found at any time of year.

Westland Petrel/Tāiko chicks fledge between November to January from their colony just south of Punakaiki. Their first flight can be a tough one, as they are inexperienced fliers, and can become disorientated by bright lights and poor weather conditions. Adult birds are also found at any time of year.

Once on the ground they need our help, as they are unable to take flight again easily, and are very vulnerable to being struck by cars and attacked by dogs. The main flight path area for these birds at the northern end of the Barrytown flats has no street lights, which is great for the birds ordinarily but means that they may be distracted by vehicle lights and come down on the highway.  These large all black birds are then almost invisible against the black tarmac until the next car comes speeding along. If you're driving in the area, please be mindful of these birds particularly November to January, and travel a little slower.  The same applies in all coastal areas where penguins could be crossing too - better for wildlife, safer for you, and less fuel used - win - win - win. The Department of Conservation and Westland Petrel Conservation Trust work together to help these birds get back out to the sea, and document when/where all birds are found, so we can work to remove attractive lights sources or hazards. Particularly around Punakaiki and Barrytown but in fact anywhere between Hokitika and Westport, there are a few things you can do to help reduce the risk to this special bird, which only breeds in one place in the world. To give them the best chance of success:

• Avoid leaving bright outdoor lights on after dark and close curtains and blinds, as this confuses them
• Keep dog(s) secure at home
• Keep a cardboard box, with air holes and towel in your car, just in case!

If you find a bird on the ground,

1. Use a towel (or item of clothing) to cover the bird and gently lift it into a box (unwrap the bird once in the box), or move it away from danger (traffic).
   • If you feel uncomfortable handling the bird or require assistance, please immediately call the numbers provided.
2. Birds found can be transported to the “Petrel Drop Off Boxes” at the DOC Visitor Centre (if the centre is closed go through the gate to the left of the front door).

*Leave your details in the log book.

3. If you are unable to transport the bird please call the numbers provided.
4. Please do not attempt to release the bird yourself.

24-hour contact numbers Westland Petrel Conservation Trust 03 731 1826Department on Conservation 0800 DOCHOT (362468)

What happens next?

• All birds are health-checked by DOC or the WPCT. Healthy and uninjured birds will be assisted to take flight again.
• Injured or underweight birds are provided veterinary and rehabilitative care by DOC.
• If you would like to know about your bird or attend its release, please let us know.

  The flyer is here if you would like to print and keep handy, share etc:  2023 11 Westland petrel flyer PDF  

Our annual report always includes a message from the Trust Chair, the highlights and challenges of the previous year and our enormous thanks to all those organisations and individuals who have supported our work.

Our annual report always includes a message from the Trust Chair, the highlights and challenges of the previous year and our enormous thanks to all those organisations and individuals who have supported our work. This year, our Chair, Robin Long, reinforces our vision -  sea and shore birds and their habitat across the West Coast Te Tai Poutini are healthy and thriving - highlights the funding challenges, and embraces the changes over the year. We report on our various projects and, for little penguins or kororā, this meant a poor season apparently linked to a severe cycle of La Niña conditions and the marine heatwaves that it brought last spring and summer. The little penguin mortality database we share with the Department of Conservation has been invaluable in focussing attention on the key threats to these birds.  We have now worked on the data so that it can be viewed on maps providing even more value to our advocacy role and for council planners.  It also helps focus our attention on areas where extra action may be needed, perhaps new penguin protection fences. Speaking of fences, we were very pleased to add fencing in the Limestone Creek area north of Punakaiki and will need to add more fencing between breeding seasons in the next couple of years to completely protect kororā in this section of the coast road. The report is available as a PDF via the link below, with updates on our Fiordland crested penguin / tawaki work, Cape Foulwind and Seal Island trapping projects, a note about our favourite petrel, the Westland petrel or tāiko, our education programme - much treasured by all the teachers and staff that get to work with Ranger Lucy Waller, and our awareness and advocacy work. We are so grateful to our donors and sponsors all year round but this is our annual opportunity to put it in writing where everyone can see it.  Our heartfelt and huge thanks go to these wonderful individuals and organisations that enable us to help understand and better protect penguins and seabirds.

WCPT 2022-23 Annual Report (PDF)

Generous support from whānau and local community helps St Canice's students build twelve nest boxes.

George Atfield's year 3/4 wonder class at St Canice's School in Westport take action for penguins! We had a fun day at the school building nest boxes for little penguins and we were ever so grateful for the generous support we received from whānau and local community. The students did so well with drills, hammers, nails and lots of paint, successfully building twelve nest boxes for the trust to put out where needed in the local colonies for next season. There were no blue thumbs in the process either! We would like to say a big thank you in particular to Laurie Cockfield, Milah's Grandad, who built seven penguin boxes at his house, two of which he funded himself. We would also like to say a big thank you to Jake Orchard (Louie’s Dad), Chris Kennard (Hudson’s Dad) and John Noble (Hadley’s Dad), who all took a group and helped out on the day.

Our very grateful thanks go to Steve Atfield at Vetpak, who sponsored the materials for ten boxes.

Vetpak is a New Zealand owned company that manufactures a varied range of Veterinary products for the production animal sector.  Products include Rotagen Combo, a non-antibiotic treatment for calf scours effective against Rotavirus and Cryptosporidium, feed additives, sanitation solutions, mineral supplements for sheep, dairy and beef cattle.  They also produce a range of specialist nutritional supplements designed for penguin and kiwi chicks.

Vetpak is proud to support the West Coast Penguin Trust and the great work they do. You can visit their website here www.vetpak.co.nz 

George Atfield's year 3/4 class have embarked on a penguin journey with us, learning all about penguins and how to help protect them. We are very happy to have this wonderful class and teacher on board!  

 

Come join the Westland Petrel Conservation Trust, DOC, Forest & Bird's Kiwi Conservation Club and the West Coast Penguin Trust for a celebration of tāiko on Saturday afternoon, 4th November.

Come join the Westland Petrel Conservation Trust, DOC, Forest & Bird's Kiwi Conservation Club and the West Coast Penguin Trust for a celebration of Tāiko (Westland petrel) on Saturday 4th November, between 2pm and 5pm at the Barrytown Hall. The afternoon will be jammed packed with information from local experts on these magnificent birds, including lifecycle, breeding and migration patterns and much more. You will hear about the threats and issues faced by these adventurous and unique local birds and any action you can take to help protect them. Their will be games for children and talks for adults, along with a Q&A session. We hope to see you all there.      

Considering the strong El Niño weather pattern this year, officially declared by NIWA recently having forecast it for some time, we have been relieved to see a very different story play out at South Westland tawaki colonies this season compared to 2015 , when El Niño had disastrous effects and all chicks starved.   We hope the season continues in this positive way for 2023.

Considering the strong El Niño weather pattern this year, officially declared by NIWA recently having forecast it for some time, we have been relieved to see a very different story play out at South Westland tawaki colonies this season compared to 2015 , when El Niño had disastrous effects and all chicks starved.   We hope the season continues in this positive way for 2023. Sarah Kivi and Lucy Waller, our two rangers, took a monitoring excursion down to Haast to do a second check on the colonies at the beginning of this month. The terrain at the two sites are quite different, with Jackson Head being a very exposed coastal, rocky area and Knight's Point being sheltered and very much in the dense rain forest. Burrowscoping is not needed for tawaki in these areas as it is for little penguins in Charleston, as they tend to nest in rocky outcrops and under bushes and trees.    

  At Jackson Head, we monitored 16 active nests: 1 failed nest with a dead chick, 3 burrows with 2 large healthy looking chicks, 12 nests with 1 large, healthy looking chick.  

  At Knight's Point, we monitored 13 active nests: 2 failed nests with abandoned eggs or empty that had had eggs, 1 nest with 1 egg and a sitting adult, 4 nests with 2 large, healthy looking chicks, 6 nests with 1 chick each. Compared to the 2015 El Niño season, this El Niño season is shaping up quite differently, which shows us that each El Niño/La Niña that comes brings with it different outcomes for breeding success of seabirds.  As a species, tawaki usually only raise one chick, with the first-hatched much smaller and perhaps back-up chick not surviving past a few days.  Seeing two healthy chicks in nest groups is very encouraging and indicates abundant food supply.  

 

 

 

 

  Thanks Sarah Kivi for stepping back in as tawaki ranger this season and for being a great guide for Lucy and for all your hard work you have done for the Trust and Tawaki over the last past years. A thank you to Andre and Polly too, for all the monitoring and trapping efforts they have done and for guiding Sarah this year. Our rangers past and present work well together to guide each other around old and new sites to make sure we get the best possible outcome for our monitoring and research.  

An update from the kororā colonies on the West Coast.

Our fortnightly monitoring has continued this year at our little / blue penguin Charleston colony and a couple of checks a season for our other sites, Whitehorse Bay, Bullock Creek, Punakaiki River and Joyce Bay. It has been a late start for the Nile River colony, with some eggs laid in August, as reported to you all in the last newsletter, but then sadly abandoned by the next check. Now we have a mixture of incubating birds, new chicks and even post-guard chicks (when both adults leave the chicks to forage for food). Last year's breeding success was low, probably due to the extreme marine heatwaves brought about by La Niña conditions, and now, with a new El Niño fully established, we are watching carefully to see what effects it may have on this year's season. Further south, at Camerons Beach south of Greymouth, we have a similar story, but with more chicks just entering the post-guard stage. We will continue our monitoring efforts for the rest of the season and by the Christmas newsletter we should have some more news, hopefully of most chicks having fledged by then.  

  Our monitoring efforts are a mixture of looking in nest boxes to searching with a burrowscope into rocky burrows, tree roots and bushes. We are always on the lookout for signs of penguins as we move through the bush, including poo, smells, tidying up of entrances, scratch marks and other common signs.  

 

 

  Watch this space for the latest news at Christmas.....

To South America and back - the Westland petrel annual migration

A Department of Conservation team, with field work led by Westport based biodiversity ranger, Kate Simister, has been funded to conduct three years of research into Westland petrels / tāiko.  The funding comes from the Conservation Services Programme, which monitors the impact of commercial fishing on protected species, studies species populations and looks at ways to mitigate bycatch. The new funding has allowed the work programme to expand to cover a range of new projects not previously attempted with this species. These include:

1. Understanding burrow occupancy rates in this species to determine how burrow mapping and nest counts can be related to numbers of breeding pairs. In particular how the status of apparent non-breeding birds occupying nest sites changes over time (e.g. are these pairs skipping breeding attempts, failed breeders or do these birds lack a partner?)
2. Investigating the diving behaviour of Westland petrels using time-depth records to determine their risk profile from fisheries methods such as surface and bottom long-lines.
3. Carry out multi-year tracking of adult birds using Global Location Sensing tags to determine extent of time spent within the New Zealand EEZ and elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere.
4. Track juvenile birds to determine if they migrate to seas beyond New Zealand.
5. Testing of different tag attachment methods for GPS or Argos passive integrated transponder tags.

The study, currently in the third year of field work and the winter breeding season of tāiko, has recently shared a progress report.  The report includes some fascinating early findings and when, complete, will provide extensive data for further analysis through an MSc student programme and new scientific papers. Findings include dive depth and foraging locations as well as their migration to South America. For the detail, methodology and early findings, the interim report is available here.

The first sign of the arrival of tawaki on our beaches each year is a set of footprints by the 4 to 4.5kg male penguins leading from the Tasman Sea across the beach and heading to the coastal forests to start their breeding season.

A new species of fossil penguin has been named Eudyptula wilsonae after the late New Zealand ornithologist Kerry-Jayne Wilson MNZM, who was an internationally respected seabird researcher and advocate for conservation.

A new species of fossil penguin has been named Eudyptula wilsonae after the late New Zealand ornithologist Kerry-Jayne Wilson MNZM, an internationally respected seabird researcher and advocate for conservation, and chair and scientist for the West Coast Penguin Trust. New penguin species are being found and fitted into the jigsaw of the origins and lineage of penguins by a team from Massey University, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Bruce Museum in the USA.  This one, related to the little penguin or kororā of today, was found in three-million-year-old sediments in the Taranaki region.  

  Trust Manager, Inger Perkins, said: “Naming this new species of little penguin after her is a wonderful and fitting acknowledgement for her enormous contribution to seabird science over many decades. We are thrilled her name will live on in connection with penguins, it is a tremendous and richly deserved honour.” Read the whole story here: https://www.massey.ac.nz/about/news/little-fossil-penguin-species-discovered-with-possible-connection-to-korora/  And the research has been published in the Journal of Paleontology: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-paleontology/article/pliocene-fossils-support-a-new-zealand-origin-for-the-smallest-extant-penguins/A722D072F8EE3B5FC194A33EF7DBC47F