The Little penguin is the world’s smallest penguin. Like all the other species in its family it is flightless, uses its modified wings as flippers, spends most of its life at sea, and lives in the Southern Hemisphere. (Curiously, the word ‘penguin’ was originally the name of a flightless seabird, now extinct, that lived in the far north).
The one thing Little penguins can’t do at sea is breed, which is why they come ashore at night to lay their eggs and tend to their chicks in underground burrows. The routine is not uncommon among seabirds: Filfla may look like a parched and lifeless rock during the day, but it comes alive at night as thousands of petrels and shearwaters fly in to feed their chicks deep among the boulders.
I was there one sleepless night some 20 years ago when a petrel was netted that wore a ring that had been fitted to it as a chick in the 1970s. Joe Sultana, the doyen of Maltese ornithology and quite possibly the one who had originally ringed it, joked with me that here was a bird that was older than I was. Year after year, that petrel had somehow navigated hundreds of miles to exactly the same place where it was born.
‘Natal philopatry’ is the term that scientists use to describe the tendency of certain animals to return to their birthplace to breed. ‘Natal’ is the obvious bit and ‘philopatry’ translates simply as a love for one’s home. Exactly what it means for a petrel to ‘love’ Filfla is unknown, and likely to remain so until a Google translator is invented that can decipher animal language. As is, the only way to know what it is like to be a bat, is to be a bat.
Certainly we know that, whatever love means for Little penguins, it is an overpowering feeling that makes them do funny things. The place they keep going back to is the coast of southern Australia and New Zealand, where tens of thousands of pairs breed in an elaborate necklace of colonies.
Most of these colonies are found on remote offshore islands. There, deep in sandy burrows among the rocks, Little penguins have made and loved their seasonal homes for thousands of years. Flightless and not the nippiest of walkers, penguins are extremely vulnerable to predators when they come ashore. The cover of night, as well as the absence of native predators in that part of the world, have made it possible for them to thrive.
Much of the island had been reduced to rubble; and yet, the petrels had kept returning to lay their eggs among the unexploded bombs
Not so in Manly, a sandy cove in Sydney harbour which is home to some of the choicest waterside homes and bars in the city. The sea at Manly is rich in the fish and squid that are the sustenance of Little penguin chicks. It is on land that the problems start. Beachfront development brings with it heavy disturbance in the form of light and noise, destruction of burrows and walkways, road kills, and attacks by dogs and foxes.
And yet, the penguins keep going back. There were once thousands that bred at Manly; now, the number is down to about 50 pairs. The effort these reluctant urbanites make to retain their home is humbling. One author writes of birds that, when faced with a newly-built seawall, came ashore farther up the coast, waddled across a beach and up a flight of steps, down another flight of steps, and finally made it to their old burrows underneath the house the seawall had blocked them from.
Exactly why Little penguins are so loyal to their birthplaces is hard to understand. The southern coasts of Australia and New Zealand are thousands of miles long and provide endless alternatives. The Little penguins of Manly could simply move elsewhere. Point is, they don’t.
One way to put it would be that penguins are stupid. Another is that they are hard-wired to be philopatric, and have no choice but to be so. Put less brutally, Manly is their home and means something to them, whatever it might be. Hundreds of generations of birds have chosen that exact same spot and are unlikely to abandon it unless absolutely forced to. It is a matter of continuity and legacy, really.
Which is why, in the late 1960s, Sultana and a few others campaigned to convince the British Navy to stop using Filfla as target practice. Much of the island had been reduced to rubble; and yet, the petrels had kept returning to lay their eggs among the unexploded bombs and shrapnel that still today pepper the island. The petrels could have gone elsewhere. Filfla, battered as it was, was their home.
The campaigns came at the right time – ultimately, it was history and geopolitics that saved the petrels. The penguins of Manly, on the other hand, are on the wrong side. As Sydney stretches against its seams, and as developers relentlessly swallow up the coast, it will become more and more difficult for them to access their burrows among the seawalls and the infinity pools.
For the penguins that remain, and for generations of their offspring, home will become a foreign place. Whether or not they retain their foothold among the chaos of Manly, the line of continuity and legacy will be broken. For once, it will not take a bat to know what it is like to be one.
Note: This piece is inspired by Thom Van Dooren’s Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (2014), as well as by a string of Planning Authority decisions.
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