Penguin Island (2010) s01e06 Episode Script
Summer Ends on Penguin island
There's a very special island off the south coast of Australia, where thousands of penguins come to breed.
And thousands of people come to watch.
Unique to this corner of our planet, the smallest of all penguin species, the Little Penguin, is battling to survive in a human world.
But a dedicated team of scientists has sworn to guard them from people, predators and this year, from the hottest summer since records began.
As starving chicks struggle to hang on and their parents scour the oceans for a dwindling supply of fish, what will it take to protect these pocket-sized creatures? The punishing summer season is coming to an end.
The last beach houses are going - there'll be no more holidays among the penguins.
And when an oil slick threatens the colony a woolly jumper might just be the answer.
Meanwhile one last chick must finally choose - wait for her parents to return, or brave it alone in the Southern Ocean? Penguin fans who flock to Phillip Island usually have to wait until the nightly parade to see the stars of the show.
But not now the annual moult is in full swing.
It's the one time of year when you can easily spot penguins on land, as they sit out the day growing new waterproof feathers.
Just behind the tourist centre all alone in her nest box is Tilda, the single surviving chick of penguin parents Rocky and Jess.
She's now six weeks old.
She needs a good couple of weeks of fattening up before she can head out to sea.
But Tilda's mum has gone off somewhere, maybe to moult, leaving Tilda all alone.
She only needs to look around.
The bad hair-dos are a tell-tale sign.
These penguins can't swim and they can't feed.
All they can do is mope around on shore, weakened and plagued by parasites.
There's a lot to complain about! Above the racket, Tilda hears a comforting sound penguin footsteps heading her way.
But it's not her mum It's her father Rocky! He's instantly drawn to Tilda's squeaking call and dinner is served up.
With Tilda's mother gone AWOL, Rocky is now the sole provider.
It's hard work.
Tilda is now almost as big as he is.
It's only the dedication of her dad that's keeping her alive, but once Rocky starts losing his feathers, it's game over.
He won't be feeding Tilda any more.
But for now he bundles her out of harm's way and heads off with the early morning fishing squad.
He's eating and fishing for two.
Island zoologists, like Andre Chiaradia, know from bitter experience that chicks born late in the season rarely survive.
Andre doesn't hold out much hope for little Tilda.
The chicks in this area, they live in such an unpredictable environment.
It's like gambling.
So they can survive but their chances are really low.
While Tilda's fate hangs in the balance, there's no future for humans living here.
For years both penguins and people inhabited this peninsula.
Now the government's bought up all the houses in the penguin colony and is literally carting them away.
It's every penguin scientists' dream - a people-free penguin park.
Within a few years, this area we're standing in, right through for about one or two kilometres that way will be all penguin habitat.
There'll be no signs of human habitation.
The power poles will be gone, the buildings will be gone.
It will look pretty much like we've never been here.
Next house due for demolition, with the best view and location, belongs to ranger Elizabeth Lundahl Hegedus.
She's lived and worked here for 35 years but now it's time to bid her penguin neighbours farewell.
I am going to miss them, yes.
I certainly am.
We have to leave.
We've got to go somewhere else.
It's stressful, isn't it? And it's not just people getting kicked out.
Field researcher Leanne Renwick, is evicting any penguin squatters who might be injured by the demolition crews.
When they're moulting, they're happy to just sit anywhere - under trees, but they could be under the plastic or between tyres or pretty much anywhere.
I'm not 100% sure what I can see but I think it's a penguin.
Can I give you that one? I think I've got a good hold on this one.
These boxes, I've actually just brought in because we've been finding so many penguins on the site and under the house.
Any bewildered little stragglers they find are given temporary digs somewhere safer.
It's off to the island hospital for this female with infected eyes.
Yet another patient for head carer, Marg Healy.
Stuck on land, growing new feathers, penguins can't flush their eyes out in the saltwater sea.
Well, a completely blind penguin dies or even a penguin with one eye dies because they can't fish, but one that's fixable, we fix.
Well, she's in mid-moult and basically she's just sitting around doing nothing much except pushing these new feathers out of the same follicle that the old feathers were in.
So they have this yearly risky time of getting fat enough, changing all their feathers and getting back into the water before they're too thin to feed themselves.
It is one of their really stressful, hard times.
There you go.
Marg's penguin care service is there to help 24/7.
But it wasn't always like this.
In the days before the wildlife hospital, an injured penguin's only chance was to be rescued by a family like this one who'd cuddle and fuss the little fella back to health before setting him free again.
These days, scientists have strict rules for studying penguins.
They are dealing with wild animals, and if they handle them too much they stop being a wild study sample.
So the scientists test a new device to weigh the birds without any human contact.
It's an automatic penguin weighbridge.
Originally built for bigger Antarctic seabirds, they've come up with a scaled-down version and stuck it right on the beach in the path of the nightly Penguin Parade.
Andre shows us how it works.
OK, this is my penguin.
I use this to calibrate my weighbridge.
So the penguins, they come out of the water.
They cross the beach and they get this little path from the ocean, they come up here, climb down these rocks, and they cross the weighbridge Blam blam blam.
And they go to the colony.
Tonight, for the first time, night vision cameras will show exactly what happens.
The punters pour in, and soon, so will the penguins.
The park has to do all it can to protect wild penguins from fans who, given half the chance, would love them to death.
Tourists may not like it, but all photography is banned.
Camera flash wreaks havoc with the penguins' night vision.
You can still get a shot of a penguin and be in the picture yourself, thanks to digital magic.
Good.
The penguins are here in the photo so count to three and then you can either point if you like, you can smile, you can "Ahh!" Ready? One, two, three.
Good, come and see.
Meanwhile, in the real penguin world, Tilda is suffering.
She's hungry, really hungry, and without fish, she's also dehydrating.
Penguins can't drink groundwater, unlike this ring-tailed possum who lives in the tree above.
Tilda's stuck waiting for her only food supply - her parents - while the possum has the run of the island.
Hopefully for Tilda, she hasn't been forgotten.
The first adult penguins are hurtling back onto the parade beach.
But neither the fans nor the penguins have any clue about the weighbridge lying hidden in the sand dunes.
It turns out that penguins will stick to their established route back to their burrows, even if it means waddling across an unfamiliar hunk of metal.
The machine doesn't just weigh the penguins, it can identify them too, thanks to microchips inserted under their skin.
And there's good news for Tilda.
Right in the middle of the group is Jess, her mum.
Topping out at 1.
6 kilos, she's clearly carrying a bellyful of fish, plenty for little Tilda.
Tilda's unaware her mum's on her way and gets on with all that important preening.
She must rid herself of fluffy down if she's ever to make it to the sea.
Then she hears the sound of a penguin outside.
Mum's back! But Tilda is in for a shock.
After two weeks away Jess seems surprised to find her in the nestbox.
And as chicks have difficulty in distinguishing one adult from another, Tilda is not even sure that this IS her mum.
She tries her unique begging call.
But Jess ignores her daughter's desperate pleas.
It's a cruel twist of nature.
Jess's moulting hormones have kicked in and they've switched off all her maternal instincts.
She will no longer feed her own flesh and blood.
The only one who can save Tilda now is her dad, Rocky.
It's not just starvation that endangers animal life on the island.
It's annoying oil is all I can say.
We thought we got it off but I've just checked it and it's still slimy.
Yeah, it's a big female.
Yeah, she's pretty angry.
Alrighty.
It's very hard to wash a black swan by yourself.
This time the threat is man-made.
Marg's taken in a swan coated in crude oil.
And now there's a penguin that's nearly drowned in the same poisonous sludge.
Somewhere out at sea a tanker must have sprung a leak, and this little chap has surfaced in the middle of an oil slick.
Penguins can't fly out of it or over it, so they swim straight through it, and they tend to have it sort of as a pattern on their chest.
And they will ingest the oil when they're preening because they use their beaks to pull the oil off their feathers.
And if it gets into their system it's very toxic and will kill them.
We've got a really, really good detergent that covers a wide range of crude oils.
Sometimes if it's very tarry it can be a little bit like bitumen on the road.
And it's been setting on the bird for a long time.
To stop them eating oil off the feathers, a secret weapon - a woolly penguin polo-neck.
The jumpers work by being all over their body, which tends to be where the oil is, and the penguin, when it tries to actually preen the oil, they can't get at it because the jumper's covering the oil patches.
We did a prototype and tested it out on a penguin and now people all over the world knit these and we use hundreds of them in oil spills.
Somehow it went worldwide and now we've got about 5,000 in storage and we still get about 50 a week.
But the jumpers don't come in extra-extra large.
The only way to stop a black swan ingesting oil off its own feathers is to scrub him clean.
And that's a job for at least two.
But it's like something that comes out of your car, basically.
It's very slimy and Thick.
There you go.
Good girl.
MOBILE PHONE RINGS I'm in the middle of washing an oiled swan, so can you ring in about half an hour? Another day has passed since little Tilda was rejected by her own mother.
She hasn't eaten in three days and now there's no sign of her father, Rocky, either.
Tilda is seriously hungry.
And so is a passing blue-tongued lizard.
Tilda's too young to know that blue tongues go for abandoned eggs, not penguin chicks.
And she cries out for her dad.
But Rocky's not listening.
Even though he's just twenty yards away squatting in a rainwater drain.
Rocky looked after Tilda single-handedly for a whole week.
But now he too has started to moult and, instinctively, he's abandoned her.
Tilda's been left home alone and her mum and dad are never coming back.
She must swim and fish or stay and die.
The lucky families with houses on the island have watched the life-and-death struggle of the Little Penguins for years.
Oh, look there's a penguin.
There.
A penguin.
Not any more.
It's checkout time.
Everyone to be gone by the end of the day.
Is that it? Yeah! Thank you! 23 years of summer holidays among the penguins are over for the Wagner family.
Just around the next headland, Elizabeth sets off for a new life in the suburbs, with humans, not penguins, for neighbours.
It's the first time anywhere that an entire housing estate has been cleared for a single animal species.
It's nearly sunrise.
All over the colony, the feather duster look is out and glossy new waterproofs are in.
Ravenous after their forced starvation, it's time for these born-again birds to get down to the sea and find something to eat.
And Tilda, the starving chick, has heard their call.
But she holds back.
She's barely big enough or feathered enough to survive the ocean.
She's just not ready.
Maybe one more day before she heads out to sea.
Marg's washed all the oil off the penguin caught in the slick.
Let's hope he doesn't swim into another one.
OK, have a good life, sweetheart, look after yourself.
Be careful.
Bye-bye.
There you go.
And as for the penguin with the 50-50 chance of blindness - 20-20 vision.
That one's still a little bit sore, but this one's just perfect.
They're both looking really good.
I don't know if you can see that but they're nice and clear, third eyelid's moving across perfectly.
So she's lovely and pink in her mouth.
That means she's feeling much better today.
So just a couple of fish.
It's very hard not to feed them their own feathers at this stage of life.
This one not only gets a safe place to finish moulting, but regular meals included.
There you go.
I think she's doing so well she can stay outside today.
That's one more penguin life saved.
But what about little Tilda? Where is everyone? They must have already left for the day.
For Tilda, it's now or never.
Somewhere out there is her future.
But there's no-one to show her the way.
The other penguins are already on the beach.
Anxious to reach the water before dawn, they're not about to wait for a chick like Tilda.
She hesitates for a moment, but she really has no choice.
Her only hope now is to try and do what the others do.
Her fluffy feathers betray her youth.
If her waterproofing doesn't work, she'll drown.
Too late, she's off! So far so good.
We won't know if she makes it past sharks, gulls and tankers until she returns one day, to have her own chicks.
With most penguins now gone to sea, Marg can finally take a break.
I haven't looked at the statistics but we've had more penguins long term than ever besides oil spills.
So, yeah, it's been a bloody hard season.
And some of her patients have outstayed their welcome, like Jonathan - a perfectly healthy silver gull who walked in one day and never left! You're noisy.
Come on! Go and play with the real seagulls.
Attaboy.
"Seagull-walker" is not in Marg's job description.
You stay out there.
Any remaining animals will be looked after by volunteers while she's away.
Last year, I took four weeks holidays and four weeks leave without pay.
It's been a very long season and four weeks just isn't enough time to recover body and mind, I don't think.
You sleep! Bye, guys.
It's been one of the toughest years ever on Phillip Island.
When hundreds of loyal penguin couples reunited to start new families.
Their chicks thrived at first, before a blistering heatwave and famine devastated the colony.
And the scientists discovered the birds were travelling further than ever to find food for their chicks.
For some, it was all too much.
No, we lost him.
Others only just made it.
Males had to fight beak to beak for females.
But lifelong relationships were formed.
And couples like Rocky and Jess are still together.
There'll be plenty of space for the next generation of Little Penguins thanks to the people who've given up their homes and their unforgettable holidays to turn this place into a dedicated animal habitat.
For the first time in half a century, these remarkable seabirds will take back their island Penguin Island.
E- mail subtitling@bbc.
co.
uk
And thousands of people come to watch.
Unique to this corner of our planet, the smallest of all penguin species, the Little Penguin, is battling to survive in a human world.
But a dedicated team of scientists has sworn to guard them from people, predators and this year, from the hottest summer since records began.
As starving chicks struggle to hang on and their parents scour the oceans for a dwindling supply of fish, what will it take to protect these pocket-sized creatures? The punishing summer season is coming to an end.
The last beach houses are going - there'll be no more holidays among the penguins.
And when an oil slick threatens the colony a woolly jumper might just be the answer.
Meanwhile one last chick must finally choose - wait for her parents to return, or brave it alone in the Southern Ocean? Penguin fans who flock to Phillip Island usually have to wait until the nightly parade to see the stars of the show.
But not now the annual moult is in full swing.
It's the one time of year when you can easily spot penguins on land, as they sit out the day growing new waterproof feathers.
Just behind the tourist centre all alone in her nest box is Tilda, the single surviving chick of penguin parents Rocky and Jess.
She's now six weeks old.
She needs a good couple of weeks of fattening up before she can head out to sea.
But Tilda's mum has gone off somewhere, maybe to moult, leaving Tilda all alone.
She only needs to look around.
The bad hair-dos are a tell-tale sign.
These penguins can't swim and they can't feed.
All they can do is mope around on shore, weakened and plagued by parasites.
There's a lot to complain about! Above the racket, Tilda hears a comforting sound penguin footsteps heading her way.
But it's not her mum It's her father Rocky! He's instantly drawn to Tilda's squeaking call and dinner is served up.
With Tilda's mother gone AWOL, Rocky is now the sole provider.
It's hard work.
Tilda is now almost as big as he is.
It's only the dedication of her dad that's keeping her alive, but once Rocky starts losing his feathers, it's game over.
He won't be feeding Tilda any more.
But for now he bundles her out of harm's way and heads off with the early morning fishing squad.
He's eating and fishing for two.
Island zoologists, like Andre Chiaradia, know from bitter experience that chicks born late in the season rarely survive.
Andre doesn't hold out much hope for little Tilda.
The chicks in this area, they live in such an unpredictable environment.
It's like gambling.
So they can survive but their chances are really low.
While Tilda's fate hangs in the balance, there's no future for humans living here.
For years both penguins and people inhabited this peninsula.
Now the government's bought up all the houses in the penguin colony and is literally carting them away.
It's every penguin scientists' dream - a people-free penguin park.
Within a few years, this area we're standing in, right through for about one or two kilometres that way will be all penguin habitat.
There'll be no signs of human habitation.
The power poles will be gone, the buildings will be gone.
It will look pretty much like we've never been here.
Next house due for demolition, with the best view and location, belongs to ranger Elizabeth Lundahl Hegedus.
She's lived and worked here for 35 years but now it's time to bid her penguin neighbours farewell.
I am going to miss them, yes.
I certainly am.
We have to leave.
We've got to go somewhere else.
It's stressful, isn't it? And it's not just people getting kicked out.
Field researcher Leanne Renwick, is evicting any penguin squatters who might be injured by the demolition crews.
When they're moulting, they're happy to just sit anywhere - under trees, but they could be under the plastic or between tyres or pretty much anywhere.
I'm not 100% sure what I can see but I think it's a penguin.
Can I give you that one? I think I've got a good hold on this one.
These boxes, I've actually just brought in because we've been finding so many penguins on the site and under the house.
Any bewildered little stragglers they find are given temporary digs somewhere safer.
It's off to the island hospital for this female with infected eyes.
Yet another patient for head carer, Marg Healy.
Stuck on land, growing new feathers, penguins can't flush their eyes out in the saltwater sea.
Well, a completely blind penguin dies or even a penguin with one eye dies because they can't fish, but one that's fixable, we fix.
Well, she's in mid-moult and basically she's just sitting around doing nothing much except pushing these new feathers out of the same follicle that the old feathers were in.
So they have this yearly risky time of getting fat enough, changing all their feathers and getting back into the water before they're too thin to feed themselves.
It is one of their really stressful, hard times.
There you go.
Marg's penguin care service is there to help 24/7.
But it wasn't always like this.
In the days before the wildlife hospital, an injured penguin's only chance was to be rescued by a family like this one who'd cuddle and fuss the little fella back to health before setting him free again.
These days, scientists have strict rules for studying penguins.
They are dealing with wild animals, and if they handle them too much they stop being a wild study sample.
So the scientists test a new device to weigh the birds without any human contact.
It's an automatic penguin weighbridge.
Originally built for bigger Antarctic seabirds, they've come up with a scaled-down version and stuck it right on the beach in the path of the nightly Penguin Parade.
Andre shows us how it works.
OK, this is my penguin.
I use this to calibrate my weighbridge.
So the penguins, they come out of the water.
They cross the beach and they get this little path from the ocean, they come up here, climb down these rocks, and they cross the weighbridge Blam blam blam.
And they go to the colony.
Tonight, for the first time, night vision cameras will show exactly what happens.
The punters pour in, and soon, so will the penguins.
The park has to do all it can to protect wild penguins from fans who, given half the chance, would love them to death.
Tourists may not like it, but all photography is banned.
Camera flash wreaks havoc with the penguins' night vision.
You can still get a shot of a penguin and be in the picture yourself, thanks to digital magic.
Good.
The penguins are here in the photo so count to three and then you can either point if you like, you can smile, you can "Ahh!" Ready? One, two, three.
Good, come and see.
Meanwhile, in the real penguin world, Tilda is suffering.
She's hungry, really hungry, and without fish, she's also dehydrating.
Penguins can't drink groundwater, unlike this ring-tailed possum who lives in the tree above.
Tilda's stuck waiting for her only food supply - her parents - while the possum has the run of the island.
Hopefully for Tilda, she hasn't been forgotten.
The first adult penguins are hurtling back onto the parade beach.
But neither the fans nor the penguins have any clue about the weighbridge lying hidden in the sand dunes.
It turns out that penguins will stick to their established route back to their burrows, even if it means waddling across an unfamiliar hunk of metal.
The machine doesn't just weigh the penguins, it can identify them too, thanks to microchips inserted under their skin.
And there's good news for Tilda.
Right in the middle of the group is Jess, her mum.
Topping out at 1.
6 kilos, she's clearly carrying a bellyful of fish, plenty for little Tilda.
Tilda's unaware her mum's on her way and gets on with all that important preening.
She must rid herself of fluffy down if she's ever to make it to the sea.
Then she hears the sound of a penguin outside.
Mum's back! But Tilda is in for a shock.
After two weeks away Jess seems surprised to find her in the nestbox.
And as chicks have difficulty in distinguishing one adult from another, Tilda is not even sure that this IS her mum.
She tries her unique begging call.
But Jess ignores her daughter's desperate pleas.
It's a cruel twist of nature.
Jess's moulting hormones have kicked in and they've switched off all her maternal instincts.
She will no longer feed her own flesh and blood.
The only one who can save Tilda now is her dad, Rocky.
It's not just starvation that endangers animal life on the island.
It's annoying oil is all I can say.
We thought we got it off but I've just checked it and it's still slimy.
Yeah, it's a big female.
Yeah, she's pretty angry.
Alrighty.
It's very hard to wash a black swan by yourself.
This time the threat is man-made.
Marg's taken in a swan coated in crude oil.
And now there's a penguin that's nearly drowned in the same poisonous sludge.
Somewhere out at sea a tanker must have sprung a leak, and this little chap has surfaced in the middle of an oil slick.
Penguins can't fly out of it or over it, so they swim straight through it, and they tend to have it sort of as a pattern on their chest.
And they will ingest the oil when they're preening because they use their beaks to pull the oil off their feathers.
And if it gets into their system it's very toxic and will kill them.
We've got a really, really good detergent that covers a wide range of crude oils.
Sometimes if it's very tarry it can be a little bit like bitumen on the road.
And it's been setting on the bird for a long time.
To stop them eating oil off the feathers, a secret weapon - a woolly penguin polo-neck.
The jumpers work by being all over their body, which tends to be where the oil is, and the penguin, when it tries to actually preen the oil, they can't get at it because the jumper's covering the oil patches.
We did a prototype and tested it out on a penguin and now people all over the world knit these and we use hundreds of them in oil spills.
Somehow it went worldwide and now we've got about 5,000 in storage and we still get about 50 a week.
But the jumpers don't come in extra-extra large.
The only way to stop a black swan ingesting oil off its own feathers is to scrub him clean.
And that's a job for at least two.
But it's like something that comes out of your car, basically.
It's very slimy and Thick.
There you go.
Good girl.
MOBILE PHONE RINGS I'm in the middle of washing an oiled swan, so can you ring in about half an hour? Another day has passed since little Tilda was rejected by her own mother.
She hasn't eaten in three days and now there's no sign of her father, Rocky, either.
Tilda is seriously hungry.
And so is a passing blue-tongued lizard.
Tilda's too young to know that blue tongues go for abandoned eggs, not penguin chicks.
And she cries out for her dad.
But Rocky's not listening.
Even though he's just twenty yards away squatting in a rainwater drain.
Rocky looked after Tilda single-handedly for a whole week.
But now he too has started to moult and, instinctively, he's abandoned her.
Tilda's been left home alone and her mum and dad are never coming back.
She must swim and fish or stay and die.
The lucky families with houses on the island have watched the life-and-death struggle of the Little Penguins for years.
Oh, look there's a penguin.
There.
A penguin.
Not any more.
It's checkout time.
Everyone to be gone by the end of the day.
Is that it? Yeah! Thank you! 23 years of summer holidays among the penguins are over for the Wagner family.
Just around the next headland, Elizabeth sets off for a new life in the suburbs, with humans, not penguins, for neighbours.
It's the first time anywhere that an entire housing estate has been cleared for a single animal species.
It's nearly sunrise.
All over the colony, the feather duster look is out and glossy new waterproofs are in.
Ravenous after their forced starvation, it's time for these born-again birds to get down to the sea and find something to eat.
And Tilda, the starving chick, has heard their call.
But she holds back.
She's barely big enough or feathered enough to survive the ocean.
She's just not ready.
Maybe one more day before she heads out to sea.
Marg's washed all the oil off the penguin caught in the slick.
Let's hope he doesn't swim into another one.
OK, have a good life, sweetheart, look after yourself.
Be careful.
Bye-bye.
There you go.
And as for the penguin with the 50-50 chance of blindness - 20-20 vision.
That one's still a little bit sore, but this one's just perfect.
They're both looking really good.
I don't know if you can see that but they're nice and clear, third eyelid's moving across perfectly.
So she's lovely and pink in her mouth.
That means she's feeling much better today.
So just a couple of fish.
It's very hard not to feed them their own feathers at this stage of life.
This one not only gets a safe place to finish moulting, but regular meals included.
There you go.
I think she's doing so well she can stay outside today.
That's one more penguin life saved.
But what about little Tilda? Where is everyone? They must have already left for the day.
For Tilda, it's now or never.
Somewhere out there is her future.
But there's no-one to show her the way.
The other penguins are already on the beach.
Anxious to reach the water before dawn, they're not about to wait for a chick like Tilda.
She hesitates for a moment, but she really has no choice.
Her only hope now is to try and do what the others do.
Her fluffy feathers betray her youth.
If her waterproofing doesn't work, she'll drown.
Too late, she's off! So far so good.
We won't know if she makes it past sharks, gulls and tankers until she returns one day, to have her own chicks.
With most penguins now gone to sea, Marg can finally take a break.
I haven't looked at the statistics but we've had more penguins long term than ever besides oil spills.
So, yeah, it's been a bloody hard season.
And some of her patients have outstayed their welcome, like Jonathan - a perfectly healthy silver gull who walked in one day and never left! You're noisy.
Come on! Go and play with the real seagulls.
Attaboy.
"Seagull-walker" is not in Marg's job description.
You stay out there.
Any remaining animals will be looked after by volunteers while she's away.
Last year, I took four weeks holidays and four weeks leave without pay.
It's been a very long season and four weeks just isn't enough time to recover body and mind, I don't think.
You sleep! Bye, guys.
It's been one of the toughest years ever on Phillip Island.
When hundreds of loyal penguin couples reunited to start new families.
Their chicks thrived at first, before a blistering heatwave and famine devastated the colony.
And the scientists discovered the birds were travelling further than ever to find food for their chicks.
For some, it was all too much.
No, we lost him.
Others only just made it.
Males had to fight beak to beak for females.
But lifelong relationships were formed.
And couples like Rocky and Jess are still together.
There'll be plenty of space for the next generation of Little Penguins thanks to the people who've given up their homes and their unforgettable holidays to turn this place into a dedicated animal habitat.
For the first time in half a century, these remarkable seabirds will take back their island Penguin Island.
E- mail subtitling@bbc.
co.
uk