At the end of the St. Kilda Pier there is a man made breakwater. It’s a long finger of rocks piled up about 30ft above the water level to provide shelter for docked boats. It has now become home to the only breeding colony of penguins in the Port Phillips bay. The colony is as of May 1300 strong a relatively small colony as far as penguins go. They are Little Penguins also called little blue penguins or fairy penguins. They are the smallest penguin in the world (and really cute!!!) about 12-14inches when full grown. They live along the coast of Australia year round because they are too small and don’t have enough body fat to survive the temperatures closer to the Antarctic.
A group called St. Kilda Earthcare has been researching this colony for over 20 years. But the general public only found out about this colony about four years ago when some backpackers accidentally found them. And apparently when backpackers know something so does the rest of the world.
There is another breeding colony a little ways up the coast on Phillip Island and that one has about 66,000 penguins in its colony. These little blues are much slimmer than the St. Kilda birds due to food availability and proximity to the breeding sites. The Phillip Island birds have roughly a 70 to 80 kilometer trip everyday to their nearest sea grass bed which is where the anchovies like to live and anchovies make up the majority of this penguins diet. While the St. Kilda birds only have about a 10km swim every day. They are located right next to the mouth of the Yarra river which runs through Melbourne and a beautiful bed of sea grass grows in that brackish water. Leaving the St. Kilda birds with a much easier life.
Watching them come in for the night it looks like they are flying through the water. You see a little haed and then as they get within a few meters of the shore the rest of the body pops up and it looks like they are surfing across the water on their bellies! So graceful in the water I was really amazed to see how good they are at climbing rocks. Apparently the bottoms of their little feet are like sandpaper so even thought they don’t have toes they can still grip the rock. You will see them at times when coming down a hill flop on to their butts and slide down the incline.
I am posting up some photos that I took and I am sure you will notice that most of these photos are very strange. White light has been proven to cause them major stress so you can’t use a flash when taking pictures so these were taken in the dark with the help of a rather weak red light being shined on the penguin its self (they can’t see red very well). And then Picasa did the rest some of them turned into very interesting light patterns no idea what the picture is of but they still look really cool. The 2 half way decent ones were taken of an adult that was already on shore before the sun went down. There are apparently two reasons that these birds will not go out for a day one being they have eggs or chicks that are too small to leave or the fishing was so good that the bird stayed out for a few days straight taking little cat naps on its back and so now needs a day of rest.
Once they get onto the land they feed head to their burrow and feed their waiting chick. Which basically looks like the chick is trying to mug its parents. They stick their little beaks into mom or dads and the parent regurgitates part of the days catch. And these little guys don’t leave it at that they are hungry and they want it all!!! They will chase their parents around getting as much food from them as they will give until mom or dad hope up on some rocks too big for the chick to climb in order to escape.
After feeding the parents will sit up on the rocks for a while preening themselves or their mate and have a chat with each other or their neighbors. They are very social birds. They keep their mate for 2 to 3 years then for some reason switch partners.
I made friends with one of the ladies that was out that night working on educating the public and making sure that the penguins were being protected. She also works on the research team that works with these penguins and she has arranged it for me to come out with them tonight. I am really excited!!!!
It was really cool talking to her (her name is Kim), and realizing that Kim doesn’t really know any other birds than these penguins. She isn’t in the wildlife field she works in finance and lives in the area and decided to get involved with protecting and researching the penguins. Its really nice to see a community so interested and conserned about other creatures living around them.
All of the burrows are on the sheltered side of the rock and most of the penguins would swim aroung the point so they could swim up almost to their burrows. But there were a few who decided to climb up the other side and cross the path to climb down to their burrows. If only the world revolved around me and my whims the way the croweds revolved around these penguins. Everyone would split giving the bird a wide path to use in order to cross over the human walking path. And if it decided to take a little stroll up or down the path everyone was tripping over each other to get of the way (All of this slightly organized chaos was happening in multiple languages it was really amazing to watch and funny as hell).
I also saw my first Australian mammal it is called the Rakali. Australia’s native water rat, they are a distant relative to the common rat but much cooler!!! They swim along the break waters hunting for mollusks and crabs. They eat on a plate form normally a flat rock on the bank so in the mornings you will find little piles of shells along the shore. They are now protected here because they were nearly hunted to extinction for their soft, thick, water repelling fur. I really enjoyed watching them swimming around. But I really enjoyed watching the crowds of people that were there watch these little guys. You could see their faces go from eeww gross when they were told that they are a rat to wow they are really cool and kind of cute.
