Sunday 7th August 2016.

penguins heading home

​Hello friends and family
This has been a week where we have had to plan our activities around the weather. On Sunday we took the 3 hospital penguins to the soft release pens and cleaned out the hospital pens. Chris and Hiltrun went home after dinner and on Monday Karsten and I continued with building penguin houses and re-modelling the old ones that were too deep for easy monitoring, monitoring rounds, hole digging, penguin feeding, trap checking …….

A variable oyster catcher

​Tuesday dawned clear and sunny so we took the chance to walk over the hill and visit the lagoon and Katiki Beach. There were no Sealions in residence but it was easy to see where they had been and how they create paths from the sand to the dunes, creating the only escapes from the beach that has been blocked by erosion. It was a wonderful escape and we were rewarded with lots of birds to see.

A reef heron on the sand!

​Wednesday was the start of the rain and so after we had been to town in the morning, we had to stay indoors, except for walking across the paddocks to feed the penguins in the soft release pens – we got 29 mm of rain! Fantastic for all of the small trees that we have planted.

A sheep necklace

Chris came back on Thursday for a meeting with TRONT, TROM and DOC. Once again we advocated for protection of the penguins here. It was fortunate that he decided to go home after dinner as, first thing Friday morning, we got snow to sea level. It did not linger long but gave us a great excuse to complain about the weather.

Home sweet home

​Yesterday was the annual penguin symposium in Dunedin and I took Karsten south so he can continue his holiday. Thank you Karsten for your great efforts on behalf of the penguins! While he was here he saw whales, seals penguins and dolphins – not bad eh?

and the snow lingered...

Have a great week.
Rosalie
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