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The Flood Chicks.

This is the true story of Maureen, Aunty Dot and TK Pink; three little penguins who survived a Cyclone.
On the 15th of December 2021, Tropical Cyclone Ruby - after causing havoc in other Pacific Island nations, arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand. Ruby made her way down to The Wildside, a series of Small Isolated bays on the South-eastern corner of Te Pataka o Raikiahautu/Banks Peninsula. Here she let rip and dropped over 300mml of rain within 24 hours. That’s a lot of rain!

Shireen and Francis Helps could see the creek water rising and waterfalls cascading down the hills through paddocks on their farm. They had been protecting little penguins on their farm in Pōhatu/ Flea Bay for over 30 years. They started to worry about nesting penguins in the little houses they had built for them, it was the time of year when many penguins still had fluffy chicks.

You might think, hang on, don’t penguins swim? Why worry about flooding? Couldn’t they just swim away? Well, little fluffy chicks can’t survive in water for long. They don’t have waterproof feathers like their parents yet, and no insulation, so they can get really cold and become hypothermic.
Shireen called up some of the team. Pōhatu Penguins Nature guides, Kev, Ave and Mark. She said they might need some help and that Farmer Dan (her son), was already out rescuing stranded sheep and checking on penguins. They had already lost a few of the predator control traps to the swollen creek - which had swept them away to sea. She was worried about some of the penguin nest boxes near the creek with the rising water.

The team went around the farm, looking for signs of trouble. The rain soaked them to the bone. Luckily, they had put wet suits on, as they knew they might be out in the storm for a few hours. They drained nest boxes full of water and tried digging ditches to divert the water from flooding the boxes.

As Ave, Kevin and Mark were checking nest boxes around the house area, a chunk of land broke away and started sliding down towards the front yard of the farmhouse. Nest box G10 which had two fluffy 4-week-old chicks in it… was on the path of the landslide. Ave ran to the box, it was slowly being buried in a slippery mudslide, she flipped the lid off, and two fluffy chicks were running inside, being pushed by the box as it moved. She grabbed the chicks under her arms like they were fluffy rugby balls and sprinted away from the landslide. Kev screaming at her to be careful. The chicks were placed in a box and Shireen brought them into the house. The team kept on going out in the rain to make sure other nest boxes were safe and hoped the rain would stop.

But the rain did not stop, in fact, it just got worse. They were fighting a losing battle against Mother Nature. The creek was now a raging river. Smashing into the side of the garage. Huge logs from fallen trees jammed up against the bridge and blocked the water from escaping out to sea. This caused the waters to take a different route. The team had to do some quick thinking. Nest boxes on the flat could be in danger from the exploding creek bed - the team decided they would uplift the chicks and bring them into the house to be safe, along with a couple of Shireen’s very wet and scared pet sheep.
Penguin chicks were brought into the kitchen. Francis had just freshly painted the wall that day and now there was penguin poop on it! No one had any idea how bad this storm was going to be, the weather forecast hadn’t alerted them to this kind of level. Everyone watched from the veranda as the water rose and entered the garden.

The team started mentally preparing to spend the night up on the hill and hike the penguins and sheep up there with them. They watched the flood waters crash completely through the garage, the boat and trailer took off down the driveway/river at lightning speed out to sea… and then the quad bike floated down after it.

They watched in despair thinking the farm truck and the Pōhatu tour van were next to wash away.
Cyclone Ruby had local people cut off from the outside world, with no electricity, no phone reception, no running water and road access in places was blocked... Landslides, rockfall, roaring winds and raging flood waters trapped the Wildside's isolated communities where they were, some in major trouble - were being evacuated by helicopter.

Luckily, by 7 pm, the rain slowed down and the raging water receded slightly away from the veranda. Francis and Shireen cooked everyone dinner and gave them clothes to wear as no one had expected to stay the night and had nothing to wear but a wet suit. The water supply to the house had been broken by a landslide, so Pots were placed outside to catch rain to drink. The team watched out the window nervously hoping the rain didn’t pick up again.

They stayed awake all night with worry. The penguin chicks in the kitchen were calling for their parents. They could hear a few adult penguins - calling in the distance, in the pitch black of the early morning hours- searching for their nest boxes and swimming around the now-flooded garden. A completely new landscape to them. It broke the team’s heart hearing that. Very confused adult penguins with no home or chicks now to return to.
5 am, the rain had completely stopped, and the morning sky was a dim grey with low clouds obscuring the hilltops. Waterfalls were coming off the hills everywhere. And landslides had cut gashes down the hillsides taking out chunks of native forest and farm fences with it. The team decided to start early and go out on a scouting mission for any more chicks or sheep in trouble. The garden and driveway area where they had rescued all the chicks the evening before… was completely wiped out. The nest boxes were nowhere to be seen, washed away to sea. It was a good call bringing all those fluffy chicks in, but now they had nothing to put them back into and no rehab area.

As they scouted around the farm, they checked places they knew of where natural burrows were (a natural burrow is a hole in the ground that penguins dig and nest in) Many of these were also destroyed. Water gushed out from underground, bursting out of the natural burrows like a hose. The team found multiple fluffy chicks standing out in the open next to their burrows - shivering with cold with nowhere to go. They added these to the rest and Shireen got them snug and warmed up in the kitchen. They had also found many other chicks around the farm that unfortunately didn’t survive, this was incredibly sad for the team.
By some miracle, the house still had internet. The landline phone was dead, but the team could message over Facebook. Other members of the Pōhatu family team, as well as Doc and some of the Pest Free Banks Peninsula crew, were on their way to assist.
By Lunchtime the Doc and Pest Free Banks Peninsula trucks arrived, but… they were stuck way up the road, multiple landslides were blocking them from driving down to the bay. Everyone hiked down with carry cages for penguins. They had to wade through the creek/river as the bridge was destroyed.

They meet up with the rest of the team, everyone so thankful for the help, hugs all around. The chicks needed to be fed and looked after. Doc would bring some to Christchurch Penguin Rehab and the South Island Wildlife Hospital. The Pōhatu rehab area was now buried in a landslide and the hutches where they normally kept rehab birds in… were now destroyed.

The local community donated time and money to help the Pōhatu team rebuild the lost nest boxes and a rehab facility as fast as they could. The farm was a complete mess, but with the help of the community nest boxes were placed in safe areas and adult penguins would have somewhere to go. Over the week of the flood clean up more young birds were found, flooded out, displaced and now starving, not knowing where their parents were. These were added into the temporary rehab area at Ave and Kev’s, where the team took shifts with feeding and cleaning until all the flood chicks were ready to be released back to the wild. Once they had beautiful blue waterproof feathers and weighed around 1kg, they were released into a nest box on the beach in Pōhatu.

Seven chicks were raised at Christchurch Penguin rehab with Thomas and Kristina. They were marked with a microchip in the back of their necks. Thomas has a special Doc license and training to do this.

Once the chicks were ready to go they went back to Pōhatu and were released on the beach like the others.
The rebuilding of Pōhatu took a long time, the bridge was a ruin for over a year with no access but for driving the 4x4 wheel drive through the creek and on rainy days the only option was to walk a small bridge that could only hold one person at a time. The farm had lost its garage, which was also the workshop where all the important tools were kept. Penguin nest boxes were found washed up on Sumner and Brighton beaches in Christchurch City, all the way around the coast, far away from Pōhatu. The Quad bike was discovered floating off the coast with several different reports of it bobbing around in different random locations, eventually being salvaged by the Ecan clean-up team. The boat was found punctured and almost sunk near Lyttleton Harbour, 19 nautical miles away from Pōhatu, where a local fishing boat had luckily rescued it.
With all the kind donations and the community coming to help, the penguin habitat areas on the farm were rebuilt and made safer with nest boxes built up on mounds and away from the creek. Life started to go back to normal.

2023 -The season for penguins started in the winter months, with adult penguins prospecting for new nest boxes or spring cleaning and claiming their old ones. The Pōhatu research team now certified to microchip penguins and track at sea - were monitoring the nest boxes, seeing who was who and what they were up to, the beginning of a 10-year breeding biology and demographic study to join with the tracking at-sea marine habitat study.
Some of the adult penguins had been microchipped. Lucy and Ave were on duty one winter day when Lucy scanned a bird whose ID number didn’t look like one of the ones that had been chipped in Pōhatu. They sent the number to Rachel the head scientist and she found out from the bird banding office that it was one of the flood chicks. One of the seven that had been raised by Kristina and Thomas at Christchurch Penguin Rehab after the 2021 flood. It was the first re-sighting of a rehab bird since microchipping was being done.
The team were so excited. Kristina and Thomas told them its name was Pink as they always fed it from the pink plate. Each chick had its allocated dinner plate.

Pink kept hanging out in the colony, some weeks he was hanging out with a married couple in box G37, and some weeks he had a girlfriend and was attempting to build a nest in another box.
He was renamed TK Pink after Thomas and Kristina.
TK Pink with his partner had two cute fluffy chicks!
Later on, in the season, the monitoring team was surprised by some late breeders -when a brand-new nest box (which had been placed upon a mound next to the garden path) had a new penguin couple move in. All the boxes in the garden had been replaced after the flood and all the penguins had moved back in, with a few new boxes for them to choose from. This new penguin couple was scanned, and again, showed an ID number the team didn’t recognize.

Rachel again got in touch with the banding office, and it was another of the flood chicks raised by Kristina and Thomas. Of all the places it could have chosen to live, it was right on Shireen and Francis’s garden path!
The new box was adopted by Kaitlin one of the students doing her master’s study in Pōhatu and working as a nature guide. She named the penguin couple Maureen and Leo after her Grandparents. Maureen was the flood chick, Kristina and Thomas had called her Orange while she was in rehab (she ate from the Orange plate). So, Orange was now Maureen.
The couple had a nice new nest box where Maureen laid two eggs. Leo and Maureen took turns sitting on the eggs to keep them warm until the last week of incubation (about a month). This had the monitoring crew very confused. They found a bird sitting on the eggs with an ID they didn’t recognize, they scanned it several times and couldn't understand why a random bird would be incubating someone else’s eggs. Again, they found out it was another flood chick. This one Kristina said was named Yellow (it had the Yellow plate).
Yellow and Orange arrived in the same carry cage to Christchurch Penguin Rehab after the 2021 flood event. Kristina kept them together, raising them in the same hutch in the rehab centre. TK Pink was their neighbor in the hutch next door. Yellow and Orange were both fluffy and around 4 weeks old, so Kristina believed they were siblings. It all started to make a bit of sense for the team.
Orange was renamed Aunty Dot after Kaitlin’s other Grandma. Leo, Maureen and Aunty Dot were taking turns over the season. Aunty Dot was monitored several times guarding the chicks. She was seen snuggled in with them even more than the actual parents were.

Maureen, Aunty Dot and TK Pink, even though they were just 2-year-old first-time breeders did manage to raise chicks. Because of microchipping and monitoring, the Pōhatu team is discovering all kinds of interesting behaviour in the Pōhatu penguin colony. And they are seeing more and more rehabilitated birds coming back and thriving in the wild.