Penguins nesting in plastic and rubbish
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.
‘‘Marcio and I went to save the little dude, and he fought quite a while. The bag was around his neck.’’
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.
‘‘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.
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 that plastic was becoming a more common item for birds’ nests. ‘‘There is so much plastic that people just discard. 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.’’
The housemates are originally from South Africa, where shoppers must pay for plastic bags – an initiative, they say, which has reduced single-use consumption.
‘‘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.