Saturday's Exploits- Working Bee for the Little Penguins

Saturday morning husband and I joined with quite a few other members of Friends of Lillico penguins to do some maintenance near the penguin habitat and the public viewing platform. We cleaned up litter, planted new seedlings, did a lot of weeding and generally tried to make the environment for the little penguins more safe and inviting for them. To do the weeding we had to walk along the shingle beach which is made up of large oval shaped rocks mainly. Make sure you click on the pics to see some larger views

 

Shingle rocks on Lillico Beach

 

 

The main weed we had to contend with was  Cape Ivy and it gets everywhere. I managed to salvage a couple of seedlings that were being strangled by this insidious weed. It makes its way into all the plants and is time consuming and very hard to remove from the dense vegetation that you can see below.

 

The little penguins make their way this beach, over the pebbles, driftwood and through the vegetation up into their burrows. Many of them have burrows in this vegetation.

Lillco Beach to the north of the viewing platfrom

Lillico Beach to the east of the viewing platform

Lillico Beach to the west of the viewing platform

 



The beach has about a 50cm drop from the edge of the sea weed in the pics to the water's edge. As a result the turbulence of the water and a little breeze was stirring up a fair bit of sand.

Of course with any working bee there are always to many chiefs

Here we are signing off to make sure they did not have to send out a search party looking for us at the end.