Little blue penguins found nesting in discarded plastic under Wellington house

Monday, 18 September 2017

Wellington housemates tell of finding a penguin beneath their house with a plastic bag around its neck.

The sound of wheezing beneath their house led three Wellington residents to discover a little blue penguin with a discarded plastic bag around its neck.

A pair of adult penguins had been lining their nest in Owhiro Bay, on the city's south coast, with plastic and other discarded rubbish.

'One morning, we heard like a rustling of packets,' said Daniella Pretorius, who shares the house with flatmates Maria Antonatou, and Marcio Ribeiro.

New Zealand's little blue penguins come ashore between May and June to prepare nests, and may waddle up to 1.5 kilometres from the sea, and climb 300 metres to find the perfect nest site.

'Marcio and I went to save the little dude, and he fought quite a while. The bag was around his neck.'

More than 250 volunteers helped to clear Owhiro Bay and other beaches on Saturday, in the annual Wellington South Coast Clean-up.

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Daniella Pretorius volunteered for the beach cleanup on Saturday to ensure no other little blue penguins use plastic to build their nests.

When they finally removed the bag, they stumbled across something worse.

Plastic sheeting, old cardboard rolls, takeaway coffee cup lids and more had been piled up near the birds' burrow.

Some of the rubbish removed by volunteers from Wellington's southern coastline in Saturday's cleanup.

'You don't often see that perspective [of litter], you know,' Ribeiro said. 'You think plastic is bad and it can harm animals, but it is very seldom that you actually experience it firsthand.'

After removing the penguin's plastic bag, Pretorius asked several local organisations for advice on how to care for the pair without disturbing them.

More rubbish found on Wellington's southern coastline, where little blue penguins make their nests.

Wellington Zoo's bird keepers suggested providing dried flax, cabbage tree leaves, soft tussock grass or dried leaf litter.

Karin Wiley, of Forest & Bird, warned plastic was becoming a more common item for birds' nests. 'There is so much plastic that people just discard that it's everywhere.

'People do not understand how toxic it is; if we were to eat it, we'd be dead.

'The worst thing is animals are the ones who cop it the most. They don't know how to remove plastic from their necks or their environment.'

The housemates are originally from South Africa, where shoppers must pay for plastic bags, and they say the initiative has reduces single-use consumption.

'So coming from a third-world country to New Zealand, you expect it to be the same. But it's not, it's sad,' Ribeiro said.