The Demise of Juan Carlos and his Feathered Friends
Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:50 pm – Posted by Jenny Lynch | 7 Comments
Guest Blogger: Jenny Lynch, Places for Penguins Co-ordinator
Those of you who live in the Wellington area may have heard of the hit and run death of Juan Carlos in Karaka Bay. Juan Carlos was a little blue penguin befriended by a local resident, Pelayo Salinas de Leon.
RIP Juan Carlos
Pelayo would watch the little blue come from the sea, across the road and into the vegetation behind his house each night. Then one night Pelayo heard a car coming down the road followed by frenzied penguin sounds and an ominous thump. Going outside to investigate he found Juan Carlos dead, lying in the middle of the road with the offending vehicle nowhere to be seen.
Juan Carlos is not the first little blue to meet this fate and undoubtedly will not be the last. Little blue penguin habitats all around New Zealand are bisected by coastal roads, forcing these tiny 35cm high birds to cross the road to get access to suitable burrows. The fact that they come ashore at dusk and leave again around dawn makes it even harder for drivers to see them. Add to this the fact that little blues, like many native species, are subject to predation, habitat loss, competition for food and marine pollution and things are certainly looking blue for the world’s smallest penguin.
But what’s the solution? Speed bumps can slow down cars in certain areas where penguins cross but it can be difficult to get these put in place. Wildlife underpasses have been used overseas with some success for other species that have faced similar problems. In the Netherlands, a network of 600 tunnels under both major and minor roads has help increase the population of the endangered European badger. Whilst incorporating wildlife underpasses into new roads has been shown to not increase the overall cost of roading by a large amount, building them under existing roads appears to be much more costly. Studies have also shown that usage of wildlife underpasses is also very dependent on species, habitat, location and structure. Build it but they may not come.
At present community education about threats to little blues is one of the most common tools used to protect little blues around the country, along with the positioning of nest boxes to provide safe nesting sites, planting of penguin friendly coastal plant species and predator control. Places for Penguins is a project run by the Wellington branch of Forest & Bird and is developing a coastal site at Tarakena bay using these methods.
Many people I ask don’t even know that little blues live in Wellington because they are only onshore at night. How can we raise awareness of little blue penguins in the communities where they live to prevent them being hit by cars, attacked by dogs or eating rubbish discarded in the ocean?
P.S For a video account of what many little blue penguins go through every night as they cross the road - check out the video below -
Poor little penguins. Bloody boy racers!
OMG that photo is so sad. The Places 4 Penguins programme looks really cool - hopefully it will mean not so many squashed penguins.
Only a week or so ago a member wrote in to our branch about seeing what was probably a little blue penguin in a pond near a major bus depot on the North Shore of Auckland. It was gone the next day. Hopefully it caught a bus, and not the other way round!! But they surely do wander around the urban area…despite the traffic hurtling past. Success was gotten for planning of construction of a main highway through Auckland to take note of a resident population of dotterels a few years ago;how can we put the same pressure on planners to protect local Little Blues?
In today’s Herald (Sat 21 March) is an article about the Auckland Zoo being down to one single little blue penguin, after a series of mystery deaths (to the other five) in the last six months.
The last of the five penguins drowned - who’d have thought that a penguin might drown in a bucket of water in it’s enclosure? They say they’ll be seeking ‘replacement’ penguins from rescue centres - birds that had suffered an injury that restricted their ability to feed in the wild - once the new enclosure is finished, and also they’ve found the reason for the previous deaths and know how to prevent further deaths, I hope!!
In hindsight, thinking about the idea of underpasses and how to protect animals, I remembered that when I was a kid I had the first in a whole number of family’s pet cats which lived for longer than one year. My family home was right beside a busy main road in the outskirts of Napier, and our family’s cats lasted one year each at most before being struck by cars whilst crossing to what were then fields (probably full of rodents!!)on the other side. But this one cat of mine - stone deaf by the way, lasted for four years. And the reason? He discovered a culvert that went under the road and which if he went through it, spat him out in those fields. So he didn’t have to take the traffic on. He could cross underneath that road!!
Thanks Jenny for directing readers to my short film “Penguins Cross”, on YouTube. If anyone would like a free DVD copy of the film, for educational purposes, please email a request to the email address at the end of the film. Kind regards, Wayne Turner.
PLEASE Wellington motorists keep a lookout for these precious little blues, They are such treasures.