Born and raised on and around the wild North Atlantic and Baltic Sea, Ursula spent her childhood swimming, sailing, kayaking, and diving with sea ducks, puffins, razorbills and guillemots – those wonderful flying penguins of the North! She loves the great outdoors, enjoyed working as a backcountry guide in Svalbard, the Norwegian Arctic, and exploring Canada and Russia (where she met Thomas) before joining a seabird research project at the southern fringes of the Atacama Desert in Chile. After a few years in South America, Thomas convinced her to come over to New Zealand – and the rest is history.
Keen to learn more about New Zealand’s elusive jungle penguin, Ursula joined Thomas for a recce to Breaksea Island in 2003, piggybacking on a Saddleback translocation to check on tawaki colonies. Yet, NZ research funding was slim back then (although it’s even skinnier now), thus, it took another ten years to finally launch this dream into action.
An opportunity presented itself when, following her PhD on Snares, Yellow-eyed and Humboldt penguins, Ursula was working 2011-12 as a DOC contractor assessing the impact of nest searches on tawaki across ten different tawaki breeding areas in New Zealand’s rugged and inaccessible Southwest. Getting to know all the key players at the notoriously underfunded Department of Conservation helped getting tawaki research (already identified by DOC as a priority in 2000 – “action pending”) back onto people’s radar. With DOC supporting research permits and Popi & GPS bringing the seed funding – the Tawaki Project was finally launched in 2014 and is still going strong!
For her day job she works as research and teaching fellow at the University of Otago but finds plenty of distraction collaborating with Sphenisco e.V. on penguin research in Chile, volunteering for various NGOs including the Midwinter Carnival, as well as acting as Oceania representative for the Global Penguin Society and the World Seabird Union.