Happy Little Feet
Amidst the menagerie of animals in the toy basket at Newtown Kindergarten my youngest daughter Sylvie (4) formed an attachment to a little blue penguin (aka korora). It’s one of those stuffed native birds whose tummy you depress and it makes the bird’s call: a kind of Tickle Me Elmo for wannabe twitchers.
Little Blue Penguin, Craig Mckenzie
Sylvie’s teacher let the korora come home with us for a few days, and as the return date loomed, I promised Sylvie — in a slack moment of parenting by reward — that I’d get her a replacement (if she e.g. ate her broccoli, tidied her craft desk etc).
Being an urban father in the shadow of jungle dad exemplars like Gerald (My Family and Other Animals) Durrell, I worried I was missing a link in the evolution of Sylvie’s nature education. If I was going to get her a stuffed penguin, I determined that she should experience the bird in the wild first.
Sure we’d watched Happy Feet on the iPad and seen the one-flippered little drummer girl blues recuperating in their enclosure at the zoo, but those experiences — while worthy — weren’t really joining the dots for Sylvie and big sister Estella (6) that korora were their neighbours.
I had no idea if it was realistic to hang out with this most unheralded of Wellington’s wild things (I’d only ever seen one in the wild on a Cook Strait sailing trip). But friends had told of the colony on Matiu-Somes and of penguins wailing from nests under South Coast houses. I didn’t know a lot about the birds, so I flicked a Facebook message to Forest & Bird’s ‘Places for Penguins’ page asking about the odds of seeing them.
We received a friendly reply saying that penguins were pocked all around the harbour, and that it was a great time of year (July) to hear, and possibly observe them.
Apparently it’s a busy time of year for them. From June to March, they lay their eggs, attend to their young, and moult. Unfortunately, it’s during this time that they’re most vulnerable to predators, such as dogs and stoats.
So during this period the Wellington Forest & Bird branch and the local community work hard to protect the birds living on the south coast from becoming happy meals: by erecting signs, installing nesting boxes and undertaking pest control.
Their penguin watching advice was to hang around coastal areas with street lighting (torches or camera flashes would disturb them); to be quiet and keep distance (with youngsters in tow? … hmmm); and with a bit of luck, we’d witness the penguins coming ashore at dusk.
After getting familiar with the sounds (courtesy of NZ Birds Online) our first penguin spotting port of call was just past the wharf at Miramar cutting. Puffer jacketed-up on a still July night we, sure enough, heard them right away. Once we were attuned to the calls (a mix between a loud purr and a fretful baby), the harbour was alive with them: a Welly dusk chorus. But we had no luck seeing any, and after a half hour or so, junior nature kid enthusiasm was waning with the daylight.
We packed back into the car and drove over to the west side of the bay. Despite the promise of the ‘Penguins Crossing’ road sign, I didn’t hold out a lot of hope that this excursion would rise above a forgettable being-dragged-along-by-Dad-on-a-cold-winter’s-night-to-listen-to-faraway-sqawks trip.
We were sitting by the boardwalk; giving our korora a last chance to say kia ora before heading home to bed. By this stage the girls were more keen on watching Frozen than being frozen. I was lost in my phone, focused on taking a photo of the girls mucking about on the jumbled Lego block rocks, when Estella squealed.
“Dad …!”
An oily blue penguin shuffled over the rocks, and through the shot. Oblivious to us, it shook water off its flippers onto my jeans. We were gobsmacked. Bluey Iti then took a squiz at us and waddled off down the concrete path into the night. The girls were thrilled. Estella got to ‘discover’ our manu mate in a wet suit, and Sylvie loved that her ‘fairy penguin’ (as it’s known across the ditch in Australia) popped out of the sea as if by magic.
On the way back to the car, Estella drew a traffic warning sign on the footpath — ‘Beware Penguins’ —with a piece of chalk she found on the beach. Happy feet indeed.
A public service announcement
Rather than something Estella and Sylvie have seen at the zoo or on a screen, that stuffed korora at Newtown Kindergarten now represents one of their neighbours from just over the hill. As well as a big box tick for wild Wellington and nature parenting (this time anyway…).
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Links:
Forest & Bird’s Places for Penguins programme
http://www.forestandbird.org.nz/saving-our-environment/marine-and-coastal/places-penguins/little-blue-penguins-life-cycle
