Abandoned on Penguin Island

I’d picked up a leaflet on Penguin Island – a bird sanctuary in Rockingham, not far from Perth.  I find myself disgruntled and moody about being in an ordinary city again and the island trip seems to offer a last look at the wild world I’ve come to feel so much at ease in.  Grant is just about amenable, though nature is not his thing. and so we set out for Rockingham, guided by the trusty GPS which is speaking with an Aussie accent today. This is a relief as the American voice that takes over now and hen often mixes up left and right.

We get to the little seaside town in time to book our dolphin watching trip which includes visiting a sea lion beach as well as the feeding of misfit orphan penguins who cannot yet be let go into the wild.

The café by the dock is swarming with elderly bikies in leather jackets with their gleaming machines all lined up outside.  I observe that one or two of them glance approvingly at me in my akubra hat and laugh at myself for feeling pleased at being appreciated by these gentlemen of the road.  Old age does do away with girlish shyness. I ask on if they’ve come to see the penguins. “Shit no!” one says, looking  a mite offended.

We get on our boat, only six of us, and the wind and the sea blow away my moodiness.  I lurch about trying to catch a glimpse of a dorsal fin or two. Grant however sits tight on his bench chalking up brownie points for giving me such a nice time.  And it is so lovely.  We pass an islet with a huge osprey’s nest on it.  Apparently ospreys mate for life and improve their nest each year. ( I’m reminded that we’ve got to do something about the kitchen when we get back – can it really be the day after tomorrow?) There are these muscular looking pied cormorants who swim on the waves like ducks and then dive into the depths for their fish.  We are told that unlike most birds, they don’t have oil in their feathers and  so get waterlogged which helps them stay sunk long enough to catch fish.  When they come up they have to flap their wings dry in the wind if they want to fly.

Then we see dolphins – a group of mothers and calves.  Our guide is ecstatic. 

“They are playing.  They are having such fun”

And indeed perhaps they are. They are black and sleek with what looked like smiles on their rostrums. They rise and snort out of the air holes on their heads.  We can see the calves alongside the mothers who suckle them but never feed them fish.  It’s tough love in the dolphin world.  The calves have to learn to do it for themselves.  They actually stay with their mothers for about six years so that they can.  We are told that it’s quite an ordeal being a female dolphin.  A group of up to a hundred males will hold a female hostage and have her mate with them.  This is actually a good thing because the resulting calf could belong to any one of them and so none of them kill it.  A mother who has had only a couple of mates has to be very protective.  I think of the ospreys and their home improvements and how they seem so like us.  These dolphins on the other hand have some very different customs.

I begin to wonder if it right to assume that it is fun they are having   as they jump and dart about our boat.  Could it be that they have a cosmic memory of whales and harpoons and really want us to go away.  “We are going to make a wave now so they can have a surf”  says the guide and our boat speeds up and sure enough there is wonderful graceful leaping over the foam of the wake as we speed away.  I hope our visit was nice for them but I think it a bit presumptuous to assume that it was.  Could the surfing just be a way of saying “Good riddance”

We stop just inside the little bay of an island full of birds of all sorts – pelicans, cormorants and seagulls all perched and looking at us attentive as meercats. On the beach are sluggish sea lions.  One is reared up as though for a portrait.  I am forced to revise my rather disrespectful view of sea lions as ill favoured creatures to be pitied for their cumbersome design.  Apparently they can run as fast as thirty kilometers an hour and they bite like bears.

Our last encounter is back on Penguin Island.  The orphanage  has a pool in the middle with platforms around it for the penguins to walk on and jump off  There are tiers of benches surrounding the pool  with lots of  children as well as adults waiting for the keeper to come with her bucket of fish.  “Aaah” we say as two fairy penguins emerge from their burrows to stand, looking this way and that on the edge of the pool.  A low chuckle passes through the adults in the crowd as the couple advance on each other and begin vigorously to copulate.  The keeper hangs back with her bucket.  We hear her complaining later to another wildlife person “I had a hundred kids there with two bonking penguins.  What was I supposed to say?”  Actually once she got going she told us lots, including the fact that the penguins in question were actually both male.  One was blind which meant he would not survive in the wild.  The others, about six who emerged from their boxes for the little fish, were injured or abandoned by their mothers and would eventually get to join the other 900 odd penguins living around the island.

After the feeding I told Grant I was going round the boardwalks that circled the sanctuary island and he said he’d stay and read his emails in the penguin house.  It was windy and all around were male seagulls, their red mouths agape and screeching.  There was little doubt in my mind about them wanting me to go away.  All around the boardwalks were mother gulls sitting like china birds on their nests, plump and still.  One or two had a couple of fluffy brown chicks with them.   I wandered through the cacophony feeling intrusive but also awed to be so near the colony.  As usual I got a bit lost and I couldn’t cut across the island lest I harm a nest so it was quite a while before I got back to the penguin house and there was no Grant to be seen. The penultimate ferry of the day was pulling out.  Enquiries about a man with long silver hair and beard confirmed my suspicion that he’d got fed up and taken the ferry, which didn’t seem unreasonable under the circumstances.  The penguin lady, was however outraged.  “You mean he left you behind?” she said.  In her book it was deviant  human behaviour. Indeed I was mildly outraged myself. What were mobile phones for?  In the end the ferry came back with four Japanese girls who had pleaded to be taken to the island in time for the four o’clock feeding.  My champion, the penguin lady ran down to the quay to stop the ferryman before he left so I could get on board this extra run.

Grant was snug back in the van with a beer and my protest was only token even though I’d promised the penguin person to tear a strip off him for not behaving like a model human.  I wondered if all those coupled creatures had days like this, seagulls getting tired of protective squawking, mother dolphins slipping their calves the odd fish just to shut them up.  How standard can all we creatures be expected to be when all is said and done?