Famous Maremma guardian dog penguin project under threat

For 20 years, a penguin colony on a small island by the Victorian coastal city of Warrnambool has been protected from fox attacks by a team of guardian dogs.

Featured in the 2015 children's film Oddball and colloquially known as The Warrnambool Method by conservationists, the world-first penguin protection technique has diminished in recent years.

Safety concerns because of erosion and deep waters surrounding the island have caused the volunteer-run project to be scaled back.

Trained Maremma sheep dogs once lived on the island for weeks at a time during the little penguin breeding season, but it has been two years since a dog has stayed the night.

The dogs were introduced in 2006, after foxes nearly hunted the penguin colony to extinction.

By 2016, the population had recovered from less than 10 penguins to 200.

Dave Williams, who started the Maremma dog project with a friend as a university student, said he feared the colony was now more vulnerable to being wiped out, but that it had become too dangerous for volunteers and dogs to reach the island.

"I'd like to think that we'll always have penguins at Middle Island and it's something that Warrnambool can be proud of," Mr Williams said.

"When we started this, there was less than 10 penguins, this project is something that the community has supported and driven.

"I think it'd be a terrible shame if we lost that."

Middle Island is about 150 metres from shore, and for years volunteers waded through a knee-deep channel to handle the dogs and count how many penguins were arriving to nest, but now the water is too deep.

Population a mystery

Over the past six years, despite occasional visits to the island in good weather, the health of the colony's population has become a mystery.

"Ultimately, if you haven't got eyes on the ground, you've got no idea what's happening out there," Mr Williams said.

The dogs are still taken to the nearby beaches to leave their scent, as a warning to foxes, but he said it was not the same as having a resident guard dog there every night.

"That thousand-year-old methodology of dogs keeping foxes away still works,"

he said.

"It's not particularly safe for people or dogs now."

Marine scientist and former Middle Island project coordinator Patricia Corbett said the channel around the island has been too deep to cross for population counts for years.

"We know there's penguins on the island, but we really don't know how many," Dr Corbett said.

"We had a really big erosion event.

"For the last few years, it hasn't gotten any shallower than about chest level or waist level at the lowest, and there's a really strong current; it's not safe."

Rocky reefs have also made it difficult to reach the island by boat.

In the last breeding season, counts were only held on only a few occasions, when conditions allowed, and not a single penguin was sighted.

Infrastructure troubles

The project also relied on a wooden boardwalk built in 2002 to prevent the dogs from crushing burrows or jumping off the island, but it has fallen into disrepair.

Warrnambool City Council natural environment and sustainability coordinator Justin Harzmeyer said the council was not planning on purchasing new dogs to replace the current guardians as they age, because they could only be trained on the island.

Mr Harzmeyer said council was looking into whether there could be upgrades to continue the project in future.

"Having the Maremmas, we're not legislated to it, but it's a nice thing to do, and we've been doing it for 20 years," Mr Harzmeyer said.

"If the guardian side of the project was to finish up, there'd still be that [educational and tourist] interest and there'll be a legacy of the project."

Environmental threats

Dr Corbett said she was hopeful the rough conditions of the channel would stop foxes crossing to the island.

The last fox attack was in 2019, but Dr Corbett said with no monitoring, it was hard to know if there had been another.

Little penguins on Deen Maar Island, near Port Fairy, have been found with aluminium and titanium in their feathers, and seals were found with high levels of PFAS in their digestive system.

Dr Corbett said they had not been able to test the Middle Island colony, but she suspected they could be harmed by similar pollution.

She said heat waves and severe weather events associated with climate change could disrupt their breeding.

"Whenever we have an increase in temperature above normal for five days or more, this can really stress the penguins," she said.

Fears of H5 bird flu outbreak

Unlike colonies in Phillip Island and St Kilda, the little penguins at Middle Island were not being vaccinated for the H5 strain of bird flu.

Every spring, the penguins share Middle Island with a colony of shearwaters, a migratory bird that usually arrives in late September and October to breed.

Dr Corbett said the colony was very healthy, with at least 300 birds.

She said this would ordinarily be a good sign for the local ecosystem, but if the shearwaters spread bird flu, there likely would not be enough penguins to keep the colony alive if there was a mass death event.

"Particularly with the shearwaters arriving soon, where we know that they're coming from areas that do have bird flu and they're in very close quarters with the penguins, there definitely is potential for big impact on the colony," she said.

"It's quite challenging, as it's great that there's obviously vaccination programs happening at St Kilda and Phillip Island, but we just have to wait and see what happens."

New technology

Warrnambool Coastcare Landcare Network, the main operator of the Maremma project, have purchased cameras to install on the island this breeding season.

Dave Williams said remote monitoring would never be enough to truly understand the health of the penguins.

Mr Williams is now the coordinator of the Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation's sea country team — the custodians of the waters around Warrnambool.

The sea country team have flown drones over the island since the outbreak of bird flu, and found a few dead birds.

"Almost everything we saw was alive, there was a couple of dead terns," he said.

"We don't really know [if the birds died from bird flu], until we are finding those mass mortalities.

"We're worried about all sorts of these discrete populations and colonies, that bird flu could put an end to."

Future unknown

Mr Williams said in an ideal world, he wanted to return to hands on monitoring of the penguins and get the dogs back on the island.

"Everybody's sort of scratching their heads about how does this project move forward," he said.

"Foxes can swim, and they've been observed swimming out there in some pretty inclement conditions.

"It might be that another fox does find its way out there again — once it realises there's a whole bunch of easy tucker out there, it will take that risk again."