Over January the Wildlife Monitoring Program team (AAS 4619) has been trialling the use of drones to count king penguin breeding pairs on Macquarie Island. King penguins currently breed in ten colonies along the east coast of the island, with colonies ranging in size from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of birds.
Through the 1800s and early 1900s, king penguins were captured and boiled down for oil in the digestors that can still be seen around the island today. After this exploitation ceased their numbers dramatically increased through the latter part of the 1900s. Since 2007, Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife rangers have been monitoring king penguin chick numbers in the colonies each winter. Although there is a lot of interannual variability, the overall trend has been stable. The chick numbers do not directly relate to the number of breeding pairs, which is used for conservation assessments. Therefore, it is difficult to assess if changing conditions are impacting the population size and trends.
King penguins have the longest breeding cycle of all seabirds, lasting 14-16 months, with a breeding pair able to produce and successfully raise a maximum of two chicks every three years. This means that over the breeding season, different pairs are at different stages of the cycle. This year, we are trialling the use of drone photography during peak incubation to estimate the number of annual breeding pairs. If trials are successful, the data will be combined with August chick counts to enable breeding success estimates to be calculated. These new methods may then be incorporated into the long-term monitoring of this globally important population. The outcome of the trials and associated data will be included in the Macquarie Island Wildlife Monitoring Strategy being developed by the Tasmanian Department of Natural Resources and Environment, the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies, the Australian Antarctic Division and Queensland University of Technology.
