PROJECT
DID YOU KNOW THERE’S A COLONY OF LITTLE PENGUINS THAT CALL MANLY HOME? THESE FASCINATING ANIMALS ARE IN DANGER AND NEED OUR PROTECTION. BEACHES COVERED. SPOKE TO 9-YEAR-OLD LOCAL, RUBY VICKERY FROM BROOKVALE PUBLIC SCHOOL TO DISCOVER MORE.
Hi, I’m Ruby Vickery and I attend Brookvale Public Primary School. We were lucky to be chosen to participate in Project Penguin 2021. In this program, 670 students from six schools across the Manly area were split into groups to create unique and mind-blowing ideas that would save the Little Penguin colony in Manly. We all set out on a mission to come up with solutions to the problems that the Penguins faced. Our objectives were to find solutions that were not too expensive to help the Penguins and to draw community awareness to help out our Little Penguins in Manly, wherever we could.
INNOVATIVE IDEAS
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On our first Little Penguin adventure, we travelled on an excursion to Little Manly and met a very nice lady called Natalie. She was a penguin warden. “ If you’re asking yourself ‘What’s a penguin warden?’, they are people who live in this area and spend their time looking after our beautiful penguins.
They stand out in the freezing cold and make sure no foxes, dogs and cats are in the area. What a good deed they are doing! Back at our school, older mentors from surrounding schools came along and helped us with our projects. There were five students from my class in my group and we also had a mentor who was in Year 9. Together, we created a prototype for a Little Penguin alarm bell collar system to pre-warn the Little Penguins of any danger. Our idea was that these bells would be put onto dogs and cat collars. They then make a sound that the dogs and cats don’t like when they approach a Penguin colony’s beach burrow perimeter. The dogs and cats would run away and the Penguins who are sensitive to sound can hide in their little burrows. We would make these collars camouflaged and with a GPS microchip built into them to keep track of the dog or cat so you know where they have been and at what time. If this solution really got made, we hope the collars would be sponsored so that they could be given out for free to people that live near Little Manly.
PROTECTING THE PENGUINS Some people may wonder, why do we need to protect these Little Penguins anyway? “Just don’t worry about them, they’ll be fine.” Sadly the truth is, if we don’t help out, Sydney’s Little Penguins will become
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WORDS: RUBY VICKERY PHOTOGRAPHY: BROOKVALE PUBLIC SCHOOL
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Penguin extinct. This is mostly through dog and cat attacks killing for fun. However, another big threat are foxes, which were introduced from England. Foxes kill Little Penguins for food. Our second excursion was to the Taronga Zoo. Here we met expert Penguin Keepers who told us about breeding and caring for Little Penguins. We even went in the underground pool room and saw them swimming all around us. Oh, I forgot to tell you about Billy the one-legged penguin. If you’re wondering how that happened, Billy used to be one of the penguins who lived in Manly. One day he got tangled in a fishing line. It was so tight around his leg that it was cutting off his blood circulation. A person who saw Billy’s plight and wanted to help called Taronga Zoo to help Billy. Unfortunately, the Zoo’s veterinarians decided that his leg had to be cut off. Ouch, all because a fisherman left his fishing line for Billy to get tangled in. Our Little Penguins in Manly need saving and it’s up to us to protect them. Please listen to all the information to help protect the Little Penguins from looking out for the surrounding threats. That would be great! • Take care,
