Category: Field work

The 2016 tawaki breeding season is coming to a close. Along the north-east coast of Stewart Island, where tawaki tend to occupy every nook and cranny, few birds are still patrolling along the coastlines. Soon all of them will head off to fatten up for the annual moult in February. Where they go is still...

The Tawaki Project field season 2016 is under wraps. At least the part where we crawl through the bush trying to find tawaki nests and recover data loggers from penguin volunteers. That doesn’t mean that there is no fresh data incoming. Because the satellite tags we deployed on tawaki to examine their at-sea movements before...

This Sunday, we went out to Jackson Head once more to have a look whether the setting of several stoat traps in the last active breeding area Popi’s Plaza made a difference for the surivival of the last few remaining tawaki chicks. When we left in mid-October there were three chicks large enough to be...

After an overnight stint in Harrison Cove the Milford Sound team we managed to deploy the last three loggers before the first light on females departing the breeding area; one of which was a transponder tagged bird that carried a GPS dive logger last year. So the day’s chores were completed before breakfast! As the...

[vrview img=”http://www.tawaki-project.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/20160917_360.jpg” width=”500″ height=”450″] We carried out nest searches and showed a camera team from NHNZ round Jackson Head. Nest numbers appear way down this year with lots of empty nests being guarded by one or two adults. It seems that many birds decided to give this season a miss and just hang out in...