Penguin Chicks

Here are the first two penguin chicks I saw this season. Little dark blue-grey balls of fluff.

It is now that the nest boxes are really important - the growing chicks need mum and dad to go out and get food for them. The penguin parents leave in the early hours of the morning and come back after dark, usually around 10 o'clock. This means that the chicks are left alone all day, so they are vulnerable to predators.
Their natural predators in the nest are other birds. The black backed gulls (the big gulls we see around Normandale School) love a big, fat, juicy penguin chick.
The boxes protect the chicks from seabird attack but not from introduced predators such as dogs, cats, stoats and rats. We have traps out to try and catch the rats and stoats (we found a big rat in one of our traps on this trip).
We rely on people to keep their cats indoors at night, especially at dusk and dawn when the cats hunt the most. We also want them to keep their dogs inside or on a leash when they are walking them at the beach. A dog like a terrier would have no trouble digging into these nest boxes and getting these chicks.
It's scary being a penguin chick.