Little Penguins
The scientific name for the Little Penguin means "good little diver", as does the Maori name. I went to the International Antarctic Centre in Christchurch, which has a facility for rehabilitating injured Little Penguins. The penguins at the centre live a lot longer than the members of their species in the wild. A wild Little Penguin usually lives about 6 or 7 years, but some of the birds at the Centre have lived to be 25. They are fed a lot of fish, and the penguin feeding is one of the public attractions at the centre. These penguins will never be returned to the wild, and they will have no offspring. When one of them lays an egg, the keepers replace it with a dummy egg. The eggs are fairly large. Little Penguin populations are not doing well in many places. As with a lot of New Zealand bird species, they are the victims of stoats, rats, and other introduced predatory mammals.
Little Penguins
The scientific name for the Little Penguin means "good little diver", as does the Maori name. I went to the International Antarctic Centre in Christchurch, which has a facility for rehabilitating injured Little Penguins. The penguins at the centre live a lot longer than the members of their species in the wild. A wild Little Penguin usually lives about 6 or 7 years, but some of the birds at the Centre have lived to be 25. They are fed a lot of fish, and the penguin feeding is one of the public attractions at the centre. These penguins will never be returned to the wild, and they will have no offspring. When one of them lays an egg, the keepers replace it with a dummy egg. The eggs are fairly large. Little Penguin populations are not doing well in many places. As with a lot of New Zealand bird species, they are the victims of stoats, rats, and other introduced predatory mammals.