Susan's BIG Birthday (can you guess which one?) - New Zealand South Island - February 2008

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We're on the Otago penninsula on a mission to see penguins. Oh look, there's one!	Not just any penguin- endangered Yellow Eyed Penguins (about 4000 left). We saw these at a preserve.	A charity preserves habitat like this so the penguins can live without being disturbed. This one's up on the beach.	Part of the bluff we were standing on to see the penguin beach. There's a seal there hanging out with the sheep!
The Yellow Eyed penguins like to go into the bush and do penguin things.	Here's a big, fat, Yellow Eye chick resting under a small tree. They don't get the yellow eye stripe until adulthood.	A penguin lean-to- provides shelter while the native bush grows back (it had been nibbled to almost nothing by sheep)	A meeting? A barbershop quartet? No, they are molting. They stand like this for a month until molting is complete.
Here's a penguin in mid-molt. Poor scruffy guy!	ZZZZzzzzz.....we're in a blind, sunk into the ground. Here's a baby snoozing right in front of us!	Waking up from his nap....babies can weigh more than their parents in their first year.	They're fattened up in preparation of going out to sea for the first time and leaving their parents' care forever.
His penguin buddy comes by. Notice the band on his wing.	The preserve folks track the original adults that lived here. Hmmm, Mitch has been fooling around with Lyn!	A Pukeko	Kiwi bunny joins the birds
"Hey, you woke us up, so where's dinner?"	No rooms in Dunedin, so we drove north to Omaru and stayed the night in a 19c mansion-here's our room!	Oh NO!!! This is our last full day in NZ! Here we are in front of Aoraki (Mt Cook) and Lake Pukaki	We'll always remember the stunning turquoise water, everywhere...
How can we leave THIS?	Salmon sashimi for lunch at a salmon farm	The next day, we left NZ, but had a 6 hr layover in Sydney...so here we are at the harbor for a couple of hours!	The famous bridge, known as the "coathanger". You can actually walk on the top (we didn't)
Mitch finally makes it to the Sydney Opera!	...and it's covered in tiles	Basically it's three separate buildings that look like this....the prow of a canoe, or of a convict ship...	E noho ra, NZ- we have wonderful memories of a beautiful country. Kia ora!

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