Fewer than 100 yellow-eyed penguin (hoiho) chicks are expected to fledge from the mainland this year — and conservationists are warning that within a few years the population could be too small for it to continue reproducing.
Nest numbers have continued to wane on the mainland and this week officials confirmed there had been an 80% decline in the number of breeding pairs in Otago, Southland and Rakiura/Stewart Island over the past 15 years.
Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust general manager Anna Campbell said disease had ravaged chicks this year.
About 143 nests produced eggs this year, but at present only about 100 chicks were expected to fledge, or leave the nest and go to sea.
Then, only 5% of the chicks — just five birds — were expected to survive to become a part of the breeding population.
"We are seriously looking at functional extinction and it could be in as little as the next few years," Mrs Campbell said yesterday.
"Overall extinction, certainly in a couple decades.
"But at the end of the day, I’m looking at a world where there are no yellow-eyed penguins walking along the beaches next to my children.
"And that’s something that’s really sad, I think, and something that really affects a lot of people from this community — and I think that we actually don’t want to see that.
"We want to make the change and if we make some changes now, and we are actually called into action, we can actually turn this around."
The nationally endangered birds’ interactions with the fishing industry and dogs as well as the "big, ever-present issue of climate change" were taking a toll on the population.
Forecast marine heatwaves were expected to put still more pressure on the penguins’ foraging grounds this year, she said.
Work was ongoing to protect the birds’ coastal habitat, including planting along the coastline and predator trapping.
Mrs Campbell said the trust believed the hoiho’s local extinction was "entirely avoidable".
There was a range of "levers" that could be pulled to avoid the threats and risks to yellow-eyed penguins, she said.
"I think if there was one lever we could pull tomorrow to reverse the decline, it would be to ban set nets.
"It’s a sunset industry. But we need to be able to work on policy reform in order to turn that around, in order to make the sun set on set nets."
A founding member of the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust, Lala Frazer, said she had seen the bird pull back from extinction on the mainland at least twice.
Speaking in a personal capacity yesterday, she said the trust itself was formed because now-retired zoologist John Darby predicted there would no longer be penguins coming up the beaches after 2020 because, at the time, more than 90% of the chicks were being killed by predators before they went to sea.
Conservationists then became experts at controlling predators and hoiho numbers increased.
Soon, though, the trust’s research on Rakiura indicated the drop in numbers of chicks fledging there was not because of predation but instead was due to starvation and malnutrition resulting in poor immune systems and an increasing number of diseases killing the chicks before they could fledge.
Work by penguin groups, led by Penguin Rescue, the establishment of the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital and the feeding of underweight birds by conservationists meant more chicks were going to sea.
"But if they do not return to breed, the species will die out."
Removing set nets from foraging areas was the "only hope" of bringing the birds back from extinction again, she said.
Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu hoiho recovery representative Puawai Swindells-Wallace said hoiho were a taonga species for Ngāi Tahu and it was "unthinkable" that the species could disappear from the area.
"We don’t really know what impact that could have on the whole ecosystem."
