New homes for penguins


We are very grateful to have had a local retiree volunteering his time to make new penguin nesting boxes.

Over winter Lennox built 30 new penguin nesting houses. 
We organized the payment of the materials by kind donations and penguin adoptions from previous clients and Lennox did the rest. 2, 3, 4 at a time a we suddenly had 30 new homes for the new penguin couples.

Every year we do need to replace some old boxes and often have to add some more. Competition between breeding pairs can be very fierce and can unfortunately create breeding failure with broken eggs or worse. So the idea is to provide as many nesting sites as possible as the more we can provide, the less fighting we will have between penguins, and the higher the breeding success will be.

Penguins normally dig a burrow which can take up a lot of their time, so if they can they prefer to steal someone else's hard work. They will kick out a family of rabbits, steal off another penguin, or move underneath buildings around the coast.
We counted 24 breeding pairs underneath the wool shed and 9 breeding pairs in the unused garage, if left upside down the hatches of our kayaks is another great spot, and they mark their territory with lovely white splat marks on the seats (all our kayaks are now elevated off the ground everyday). A gumboot on the front veranda would even do the job! One year we found a boot with nesting materials and a silly penguin squeezed inside, with just his butt hanging out.

We recently also had local schools helping us out with new homes and new predator traps.
We are very thankful to all and for the community support.
And all but 5 of the new nesting boxes above  have penguin couples already moved in.
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