Vivek

This young and loved - aka sponsored - yellow-eyed penguin girl is back with a couple of eggs but she let us wait: she was the last to lay her eggs in the colony.
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We now have 41 pairs for the season - that is 4 nests fewer than last year. It was not a good year in that we have recorded 3 dead and 8 missing females overall. The ones we found dead had succumbed to avian malaria and the others were never found and may have died also from avian malaria. On the better-news front we had 6 young (2-year) females starting to breed so there has been some recruitment after we have 11 young females recruit last year. (One female returned to breed at Moeraki after a year's breeding in a colony down the road.) We are very saddened by the loss of all these females - this is not good for a species heading for extinction on the South Island.