Anyone who visits Otago Peninsula’s Allans Beach hopes to see a yellow-eyed penguin or a sea lion. Swiss backpackers Debbie Flueck and Alexandra Bangerter saw both – and what an encounter! It was Saturday 8 December 2012. Debbie and Alexandra were thrilled to see a juvenile yellow-eyed penguin walking up the beach and into the…

… and then suddenly the trip was over! It seemed as if we had barely arrived in the subantarctic before we had completed our planned six days of yellow-eyed penguin counting and were heading home. Time flies when you’re having fun and all that – and also when the skipper says the weather forecast is…

Early morning starts (today we were awake at 2.30 am!), and four hours of sitting still in the cold and rain each morning for sometimes no reward don’t sound like a recipe for a good time – but despite all of that the yellow-eyed penguin team have been having a great time. I decided to…

Awesome, amazing, and any other amount of A words describe our trip to the southern end of the Auckland islands. After we had completed our morning penguin count on Ewing Island it was a three hour-or-so journey down the east coast of Auckland Island to Carnley Harbour. Then Jo Hiscock and I parted ways with…

Sorry about the short break in communication, folks, but we’ve been having a super busy time down here. We feel like we’ve been on the go for 10 days rather than 5, but we’ve realised that’s because every day is effectively two days: we get up at 4 am, and get back to the boat…

Thanks to some clever detective work from an Auckland-based data recovery company, Datalab (www.datalab.co.nz), the identity of a dead penguin has been obtained. On 13 September 2012, Leith Thomson, Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust Ranger, found a badly decomposed yellow-eyed penguin at Otapahi Reserve on Otago Peninsula. He discovered its transponder in the sand beneath the body….