Today (Monday), I travelled to Oamaru about 4 hours south of Christchurch in order to visit a Little Blue Penguin Colony. The site is an old quarry which was abandoned in the 1970s and the penguins began to come ashore and nest on the site. During the 1990s and the 2000s, the area was taken over by the local development corporation and a visitor centre and monitoring scheme developed. The penguins come ashore at night after a day's fishing and go to their nest boxes then go back out to sea in the morning. Visitors watch them coming ashore in the evening from a grandstand but no photography is allowed as it would frighten the penguins. The sodium lighting used to light the ramp they use to come ashore is not visible to a penguin evidently!! You can, however, photograph any in the nest boxes during the day....I tried....
A penguin beak sticking out of a box (best I could do!!!!):
A weekly check of nest boxes and the flipper tags on every bird enables breeding success to be monitored and compared with a "control" colony nearby which has no public access. Breeding success is the same at each site, so the public viewing seems to have no ill effects on the birds.
I also visited the Moeraki Boulders - a group of almost completely spherical boulders on the coast south of Oamaru.
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