Somewhere in the dripping temperate rainforest of Fiordland, a penguin half a metre tall is outwitting a team of PhD-carrying researchers by digging backup tunnels out of its burrow. This is the tawaki — the Fiordland crested penguin — and after a decade of chasing it through New Zealand's largest national park, scientists are only now beginning to understand what it's doing and why. The Tawaki Project, founded in 2014 by University of Otago research fellow Thomas Mattern and his wife Ursula Ellenberg, is the first long-term population study of this species. Before they started, almost nothing was known. The project has now mapped 1,200 nests across nine fjords over 12 years, with 93 nests charted across two islands in September alone. The headline finding: the tawaki population is roughly three times larger than earlier surveys suggested, estimated at 12,000 to 15,000 mature birds. That revised count was significant enough to prompt the IUCN to reclassify tawaki from 'vulnerable' to 'near-threatened' in 2020. What makes the tawaki genuinely strange — not charismatic-strange, but scientifically confounding — is how comprehensively it breaks the penguin template. Most penguins breed in colonies. Tawaki build solitary burrows deep in dense rainforest, sometimes at elevation. They nest exclusively in forest, the only penguin species to do so. Some groups fish entirely within the fjords; others hunt in the open ocean. Behavioural patterns that hold in one fjord collapse in the next. 'When you think you have them nailed down, you go to a different fjord, and they show behaviour that just does not conform to any of the ideas you have developed so far,' Mattern says. Then there is the pre-moult journey, which borders on the absurd. After breeding season ends in December, tawaki need to fatten up before their annual catastrophic moult — the complete shedding and replacement of all feathers. Despite abundant food in local waters, these emaciated birds undertake a 5,000 to 7,000km return trip toward the sub-Antarctic to feed. They are, as Mattern puts it, 'running a marathon while trying to gain weight.' His working hypothesis: ancient instinct driving them to feeding grounds used by all other crested penguin species, a behavioural fossil that persists regardless of local conditions. The project runs on public donations, international grants, and the donated time and boat of local tourism operator Richard Abernathy, whose knack for locating nests in improbable locations has earned him the nickname 'sniffer dog.' This is science on a shoestring, sustained by the kind of obsessive, volunteer-driven fieldwork that institutional funding rarely supports. It is also, notably, producing the only reliable population data for the species. The conservation picture remains unresolved. Commercial fishing is flagged as an ongoing risk. Mattern's team is now tracking survival rates to determine whether the population is stable or declining — the difference between a species quietly holding on and one that needs active intervention. The IUCN reclassification was a statistical correction, not an all-clear. A population of 12,000 to 15,000 mature birds in one of the world's most remote national parks is not large by any standard. What the Tawaki Project demonstrates is that ignorance about a species is not the same as the species being fine. The tawaki was understudied because it is genuinely hard to study — solitary, forest-dwelling, behaviourally inconsistent, and inclined to dig escape tunnels when cornered. Twelve years of volunteer effort have tripled the known population estimate and revealed an animal that systematically defies the behavioural rules of its order. The next question — whether the population is stable — is the one that actually matters.
