Style: March 06, 2020

Hiltrun Ratz (left) works on the Otago Peninsula with little blue penguins. Photo: Blue Penguins Pukekura
THE PENGUINOLOGIST
Dr Hiltrun Ratz works on the Otago Peninsula watching the soap opera that is the
Pukekura little blue penguin colony unfold. Full of divorces, recoupling and swearing,
she has a busy job with her two-legged friends.
don’t think I’ll ever retire. I think I’ll be hobbling around the
I little blue penguin colony with my Zimmer frame saying to my
colleagues, ‘Oi! Go weigh that one!’ I love it.
I live about 10 minutes from work at Pilots Beach on the
Otago Peninsula. I’m a penguin scientist employed by The
Pukekura Trust, a collaboration between The Otago Peninsula
Trust and The Korako Karetai Trust.
In 2016, they were looking for someone to work with the
little blue penguins. I was standing in the colony and asked, ‘Any
idea how many penguins there are?’ The reply was, ‘Oh about
500.’ I thought, well that will take me a week or two – yeah
right. It took me two and a half years to get pretty much all of
them. Then I was told there were nesting boxes. I said, ‘Oh
good, where?’ and they said, ‘Don’t know, somewhere here. We
put numbers on some of them.’ It turned into a treasure hunt.
The boxes were either nailed or screwed shut, so I would have
to pry them open, see if there were penguins in there, microchip
them and then find another box.
Blue penguins are little parcels of fury really. They are offended
when I have to take them out of their box. They are very good
at biting because they have sharp edges to their beaks, and they
know they have this weapon in the middle of their face. They
also scratch, growl and swear at you. The adults are little fury
bundles, the chicks aren’t so bad because they haven’t worked
out that their beak is a formidable weapon. Fortunately, I’ll only
have to bother them once in their life to microchip them.
Before the start of the breeding season, the female and male
sit at home in their box and she says to him, ‘Honey am I fat
enough?’ If there is a nice cold ocean, lots of fish and the female
is getting nice and fat, they’ll start breeding. And, of course, she
is the one that decides because she lays the eggs. She may say,
‘Nah, I’m not fat enough, forget about it.’ But she’ll ask again the
next month.
They usually stick with the same mate, but if the mate
disappears or goes off with someone else, she’ll just find
someone else. The divorce rate is about 18 per cent and
sometimes they even swap partners between clutches! Shortland
Street and Coronation Street is nothing compared to what goes
on in this little blue penguin colony. It is the best soap you can
imagine. ‘Excuse me, this is not your mate from last season, what
have you done with him!’ I say to them.
I talk to them often. They tend to talk back, though we don’t
speak the same language and I think they swear at me a lot, but
that’s okay.
I grew fascinated with biology when I was 14. I had an amazing
biology teacher in high school. Some teachers give you direction
in your life by doing nothing more than just doing their job.
I just have a sense of wonder in the natural world. I’m sitting
here and looking at all these trees and nothing is telling them to
grow, and yet they grow. They do it despite everything – it is a
miracle. We are surrounded by miracles and we are just taking
it for granted. Animals are so resilient and just want to live. It is
that spirit of life that I find fascinating.
As told to Shelley Robinson