An amazing experience at the Oamaru Blue Penguin Colony

by Martina Mc Auley
(Amsterdam)

In 2005, my friend and I spent a month in New Zealand. We were coming to the end of our trip and we'd heard about the Blue Penguin Colony in Oamaru and really wanted to go and see it.

The afternoon that we arrived in Oamaru, we wandered out to where the colony was and inquired about tickets for the evening viewing. Apparently, at dusk every evening, at this time of the year in November, between one hundred and two hundred blue penguins come in off shore and go over to their chicks in their nests and this can all be seen from a viewing stand in the colony. The colony was set up to preserve and encourage the penguins to breed there.

We bought tickets and went back to the hostel to have something to eat. At about 7.30/8pm we headed back out. You needed to be there by 8.30pm at the latest. There was a guide there who gave a commentary for us. We were all sitting in the grandstand built especially for tourists to view the penguins coming in.

The guide told us all about the penguins, their habits, breeding patterns etc until about 8.50pm, then you could see the raft of penguins coming in from a distance. My friend Jan had binoculars, so we shared them. Then the penguins landed on the beach. The first raft had about forty to fifty penguins in it. They walked up part of the way up the rocks, stopped, preened themselves and then crossed the gravel and went over to the grass where the nests were. They were so cute waddling up out of the water, over to their nests! Gorgeous little things.


Some of the chicks would come out and go down to greet the parents coming in. There were about two or three other rafts that came in afterwards.

They were amazing to watch in their own environment. One hundred and thirty three birds had come in within forty five minutes and it was really busy over in the nests, lots of comings and goings and they were noisy too! They would call to each other and that's how they recognised their parents. There was some scuffling going on between them and it was really busy but really good to watch. I've never seen anything like that before. I was amazed. I could have stayed there for hours to watch them but it was getting late and cold and the road back to our hostel wasn't lit very well, so we had to go.

On our way out, you could stop and get a closer look at them, as there were nestboxs very near to the grandstand. I saw a chick and it's feathers were really fluffy. It was so cute and small. The guide said when you look at the adult penguins close up, their feathers are a fairly bright coloured blue. That was one of the highlights of the trip for me.


Note from Editor

Thanks for another interesting story Martina. To see penguins en masse is such an amazing sight...I haven't been to this colony. It sounds excellent.

Gail