Meeting some fine feathered friends

On Saturday I went to Phillip Island, an island about 2 hours southeast of Melbourne (above). We went there to see the “world-famous” penguin parade. Every night, thousands of the 20,000 total penguins that live on Phillip Island return to shore to rest and mate. And every night, hundreds of people come to watch them. The penguins are fairy penguins, the smallest penguin species in the world. (note: we weren’t allowed to take pictures because the flash hurts the penguins’ eyes, so all of these pictures are stolen from online)

The shore is set up with these concrete bleachers (above) where everyone sits and waits for the sun to go down. Before the sky is completely black, you can see small black blobs in the water. Then once it is totally dark, groups of penguins start emerging from the water. They must have some sort of stealthy penguin signal, because a group of 30 or so would rise out of the water at exactly the same time. Then they would waddle to a clump of rocks/seaweed on the beach. At this point, the ones at the front of the cluster would start nudging each other to go. I could imagine them saying to each other “you go” “no, you go…”

Then they would make a break for it, running across the beach to the safety of the sand dunes (above). Rather, they didn’t run, they just waddled really quickly. Which was hilarious. There were just packs of penguins that are only a food high, tottering back and forth. This went on for 30-40 minutes, with different waves of penguins coming up onto the beach.

When they got to the sand dunes, they would climb up a ways until they got to their nests. At the top of the hill they passed under a boardwalk so that people didn’t disrupt their path. Then, you could stand on the boardwalk and just watch the oodles of penguins interacting with each other (cheesy promotional picture, above). They made these strange noises that were a cross between a bird squawking and Chewbacca. Apparently these noises mean one of two things: 1.) they’re fighting 2.) they’re mating. In any event, it was so cool to see them up close.

Before we left, we were sure to check under our tour bus for our little friends (above). It was great fun.