The Korora/Little Blue Penguin is the smallest penguin in the world and our coastal community are fortunate to have these wonderful flightless birds nesting around our shorelines,

preferring rocky outcrops where they live in natural burrows or in the nesting boxes that The Leigh Penguin Project have made.

The colour of Korora are medium blue to nearly black, while the chin and belly is white. The little feet are pink on top and blue on the bottom, which makes it perfect for them to blend in. For prey in the water, they appear to

blend in with the sky, and from the sky they have the same colour as the water. These flightless birds have up to 100,000 waterproof feathers, compared to birds that fly, that have between 2,500 and 3,500. This small

penguin weighs around 1 kg and stands just over 25cm tall. The Korora have an average life span in the wild of 6 years and are social and normally mate for life. A bonded pair can raise multiple sets of young and

share the parenting duties equally.

From late October to December last year, we did weekly monitoring in Ti Point and logged visual data, for example, if the nesting boxes had been visited, as well as viewed and recorded activity from the cameras in

selected sites. One of the natural sites provided a lot of footage, where we had a bonded pair of Korora, arriving and leaving, preening, resting, and sleeping. But the most exciting moment was when we saw the new chick emerge for the first time.

We’re so looking forward to the 2023-2024 season.

Author: Madeleine Roberts, the LPP team. Reposted with permission from Leigh Rag - [email protected]