Feature in The Guardian
Tawaki make international headlines
On 17 October 2026, The Guardian published a feature on tawaki and our work in Fiordland: Uncovering the secrets of New Zealand’s elusive ‘jungle penguins’, by Eva Corlett with photography by Derek Morrison. It is great to see these remarkable birds reach a global audience, and we thank everyone involved.
The feature follows our work in Fiordland this September during which we mapped 93 nests across two islands in Charles Sound abd tracked a couple of female penguins using GPS devices. Over the past 12 years, the Tawaki Project has now mapped around 1,200 tawaki nests across nine fjords, revealing a population at least three times larger than surveys from the 1990s suggested.
Readers also get a glimpse of field life: one tagged female on Eleanor Island in Charles Sound eluded recapture through escape tunnels and took three days to finally be relieved of the GPS logger she was carrying so we could retrieve her data logger. The article also revisits one of our most surprising findings, published in 2018: after breeding, tawaki swim thousands of kilometres towards the subantarctic to feed before their moult, despite plentiful food close to home.
One small correction: Fiordland Expeditions is owned by Richard and Mandy Abernethy, not “Abernathy” as spelled in the article.
The people who make it possible
The article was originally conceived to highlight how in-kind support makes projects like ours possible, and that story deserves telling in full.
Since 2018, Richard and Mandy of Fiordland Expeditions have given us their boat, the Tutoko, their time and their deep local knowledge for weeks every season, entirely free of charge. Fiordland is one of the most challenging places in New Zealand to do fieldwork. Without reliable vessel support, the continuous, year-on-year research record we have built since 2014 would have been extremely difficult to maintain.
That record has mattered far beyond Fiordland. We doubt our subantarctic expeditions to the Bounty and Antipodes Islands would ever have been funded without it. Put simply, the Tawaki Project would not be where it is today without Richard and Mandy. Richard’s uncanny knack for finding nests in unlikely places has earned him the nickname “sniffer dog” among the team, and it is well deserved.
Thank you, Richard and Mandy!
A volunteer effort, built on long-term partners
The Tawaki Project is an independent charitable trust, and nobody on our research or field teams is paid. Our work rests on the long-term support of the Global Penguin Society, the Antarctic Research Trust, and our supporters on Patreon, alongside the generous in-kind help of Fiordland Expeditions. Our thanks also go to the many volunteers who have joined us in the field over the years.
How you can help
If the article sparked your interest in tawaki, you can support our research directly: