Tribute to the All Whites
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Watch our King and Gentoo penguins bend it like Beckham in a game of Penguin soccer – one of their favourite enrichments activities.
Enrichment Program
Our highest priority is ensuring our penguins are healthy, active and exhibit a wide diversity of behaviours. Animal welfare involves both the physical health of the penguins as well as their psychological well-being. Our enrichment program is designed to keep our penguins active and interested in their environment. Often they are so busy with their own activities, that they don’t always notice when enrichment items are introduced into the enclosure.
Environmental Enrichment
Environmental enrichment improves and enhances aquarium environments for animals, stimulating them to investigate and interact with their surroundings.
We enrich our penguins’ environment by:
- Making changes to structures in their enclosure – we increase the snow levels and build large snow mounds, make tunnels and even the occasional snowman
- Presenting novel objects such as soccer balls and frisbees for them to investigate
- Simulating weather changes that occur in the sub-Antarctic – such as very windy days
Food Enrichment
Our penguins are fed in a variety of different ways to encourage their species appropriate behaviours. Our keepers place food around the rocks or in the pool to encourage their natural foraging and hunting behaviours. The keepers also vary the feeding times each day and they mix up the length of the feed, method of feeding and what they actually feed out.
Social Enrichment
Penguins are naturally very social animals and exhibit a wide array of social behaviours and interactions. By having a large colony size here at Kelly Tarlton’s, the birds experience partnerships and bonding behaviours and we see constant courtship rituals, mutual displays, agonistic behaviours and fighting.
