Red Chapel Beach, within the sound on a still summer’s night of the chimes of the Hobart Post Office clock, has residents who go about their business in a quiet, undemonstrative way, in keeping with the fashionable suburb of Sandy Bay.
The residents, in fact, have been so unobtrusive over the years, their presence has largely gone unnoticed, except perhaps by a handful of nosey neighbours keen to observe their lifestyle in a corner of the bustling city where sea melds with beach, and beach with gardens of wattle and pine bark.
But it took an act of savagery a few years back to alert the people of Hobart, and those living in a wider circle around the River Derwent estuary, that they shared their city with several colonies of the world’s smallest penguin species, the fairy or little penguin.
A dog killed two penguins in the small Red Chapel Beach colony and Hobart’s best-kept secret was out. It was soon revealed that there were in fact several threatened penguin colonies in the Derwent estuary numbering about 200 birds.
When I was first alerted to Hobart’s penguins, it gave me a new focus on the Derwent estuary, and I began to see its beaches, mudflats and wetlands as a microcosm of the threats and challenges facing our waterbirds against the tide of human expansion in coastal environments.
As on the Australian mainland, the birds in Tasmania that nest on beaches or in the shingle and scrub behind them are at risk, including the little penguin. Although the Penguin Parade on Phillip Island in Victoria wins the public relations stakes when it comes to promoting the little penguin, Tasmanians jealously like to claim the penguin as their own. Doesn’t the state have a town called Penguin, complete with rubbish bins with penguin motifs? And isn’t Tasmania home to 63 per cent of the estimated Australian penguin population of 470,000 birds?
Despite the penguins’ apparent strength in numbers, Tasmanians still have to be vigilant about penguin protection.
The research into penguin decline is ongoing but anecdotal evidence suggests that along with general disturbance by beach-users, and particularly their dogs, the widespread use of gill-nets by recreational fishermen is a major cause of penguin mortality, trapped birds drowning in the nets.
Tasmania is the only state or territory where recreational gill-netting is permitted and most birdwatchers have stories to tell of finding seabirds killed by the nets. A birder once discovered 18 dead penguins discarded near a boat-ramp.
The chimes of the Post Office Clock were ringing out in the distance when last month I went to Red Chapel Beach in the hope of spotting penguins coming ashore at dusk. But I walked in the knowledge that further afield at least 170 penguins had been killed in dog attacks in the past 18 months.