On Thursday 16th November, Rūma Kereru and Rūma Piwakwaka had a field trip to Hokitika beach to learn about Kororā Little Blue Penguin and to Wadeson Island to learn about whitebait habitats.
We all gathered on the beach at the northern end of Hokitika where we met Lucy from the West Coast Penguin Trust. 45 students and 13 adults made a very large group of people!
Our first job as penguin rangers was to look for foot prints on the beach and identify who they belonged to. Tasman really enjoyed looking for tracks. Bede liked learning about the different types of prints and being in the sun.
Next we identified some Kororā prints.
They always go in a pretty straight line from the dunes to the sea.
We made some plaster casts of the footprints we found. For lots of us this was our favourite thing.
After we had had morning tea, we went to Wadeson Island and learnt about whitebait and restoring their habitat with Petra from Westland Milk Products. There are now lots of breeding sites for the whitebait at Wadeson Island.
This is a video Mrs Locky took at low tide a week before our visit. Whitebait are a bit scared by noise and movement so they were difficult to spot on our trip but they are there!
This was such a fun trip for the parents as well. It was exciting to see the Kororā foot prints.
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