Erect-crested penguin

How it lives

Erect-crested penguins breed in colonies on remote islands. Egg laying is in early October. Two eggs are laid, but the smaller first egg is almost always lost, and chicks fledge in February. Males lose weight faster than females during courtship, at about 63.8 g a day against 53.6 g a day.

Where it goes

Erect-crested penguins breed on the Bounty and Antipodes Islands, with smaller numbers on the Auckland and Campbell Islands. Breeding runs from about September to late January. Where they spend the rest of the year is not known. They are thought to stay in subantarctic waters.

We only draw a journey on the map when scientists have tracked it or clearly documented it. For this animal we have not found one yet.

Populations

Mostly on the Bounty and Antipodes Islands of New Zealand. Wikipedia gives about 150,000 mature individuals and says numbers have dropped sharply since the 1940s, from about 230,000 breeding pairs in the late 1970s. On the Antipodes, 7,510 pairs were counted at five sites in 1998, and three sites fell by about a third between 1995 and 2014. On the Bounty Islands a 2019 drone survey found numbers had stayed stable since the 1990s, which goes against an earlier report of a 75% fall since 1978. The IUCN lists it as Endangered (2020).