Our History

The Tawaki Trust is the continuation and extension of the Tawaki Project, which started as a scientific investigation of the ecology and population dynamics of the Fiordland penguin or tawaki across the species breeding range along the southwest coast of New Zealand’s South Island. Starting off with little resources but a lot of determination and passion, the Tawaki Project not only gathered a lot of information about the species essential to improve its protection. Thanks to the Tawaki Project’s work, the species’ threat ranking was down listed by the IUCN redlist. This will ultimately be the goal of the trust – improve the protection of all crested penguins – tawaki – in New Zealand.