O te Ukuuku Tuku

After the cruise, I had plenty of time to take me to the penguin place. It’s only a 3 minutes drive and I was booked on the tour at 4.45 pm.

So I hade to wait a little bit there until the tour was starting.
We first got into the information center and our guide Adrian told us a lot about the Yellow-eyed Penguins.
There are only around 700 of them left so they are really, really rare and close to extinction. He also said, if you see one of them in nature you are lucky if you see two you are very, very lucky and if you see three of them on the same day you might go and play the lotto the same day, as you are extremely lucky!

Their biggest problem is that we humans have destroyed their territory so much, that they don’t find nesting places anymore. They need shelter from the sun under some bushes and trees as the young once can not control their body temperature and overheat really fast. They also don’t like to live to closed to each other as they are the most unsocial penguins in the world so they need extremely much space as well.

So the family that owns this farm since 1966 has started to rebuild their natural habitat for the penguins in 1980 and they do all they can to help them to increase their numbers again.
Unfortunately, it is not so easy.

They also have a kind of daycare for penguins, they get them from animal hospitals and feed them up until they can get released again into the wild. Their success rate is actually 95%!!
They get the penguins from all over New Zealand, or better said from the south part of the South Island.
Right now they have 4 chicks, which are here because their parents struggled to raise them.
Then they have a juvenile yellow-eyed that had problems with his feathers and that one needs to stay here until the mold is over.
They also have an adult Yellow-eyed Penguin, that was found underweight and need to get more weight before that one can get released into the wild again and then there is one Fjordland penguin as well!

After all the information we went to see the patients. We had to be totally quiet and got a little bit of time to see them all and take pictures. That closed I probably never come to see them again.
So that was really nice!Read more