A weird breeding season

The tawaki breeding season this year is a bit weird.

While in Milford Sound chicks are already ganging up in crèches – something the young ones do when 3-4 weeks old – the penguins in Doubtful Sound are all over the place.

Some nests have big chicks that don’t have any next door neighbours old enough to cuddle with yet. So dad will have to do. In other nests, the chicks have just hatched.

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It would seem that the La Niña conditions over the last winter have thrown a spanner in some of the penguins’ works so that they had to work overtime (as in ‘find more food’) to prepare for breeding which made them return a few weeks later than normal. Others, however, apparently managed to come back as planned.But why do we see this in one fjord, but not the other?

As we said… all a bit weird this year.