Penguin Place

Otago

Yellow-Eyed Penguin Conservation Reserve

The Yellow-Eyed Penguin Reserve at Penguin Place offers visitors the opportunity to visit a working conservation programme and to experience and photograph undisturbed penguin activity at close range through a unique system of hides and covered tunnels. The reserve is a private conservation effort to save one of the world’s most endangered penguins, the yellow-eyed penguin, from extinction. The reserve is funded entirely through the profits from the Penguin Place tour operation. Maori called yellow-eyed penguins Hoiho (‘noise-shouter’). Yellow-eyed penguins gain their names from their yellow iris and the characteristic yellow head band. They only live in New Zealand and they are one of the rarest penguins in the world with a total population of about 4000-5000 individuals. Daily foraging trips, usually alone or in pairs, take the penguins between 5 and 25km off the coast. They leave the colony at sun-rise and usually return every evening. Viewing these wonderful birds in the evening is often a noisy affair as they return from a hard day fishing as they surf in on the waves and waddle ashore calling for their mates or just talking about their adventures at sea that day.