Centre hopes more locals will swoop in

Royal Albatross Centre manager Sam Inder hopes tourism Dunedin's launch of the Your Passport to Love the Dunedin Difference project will encourage more Dunedin residents to discover their local treasures.

About 150,000 people a year visit the Otago Peninsula's Taiaroa Head to experience the unique relationship between wildlife and warfare, which is the Royal Albatross Centre and historic Fort Taiaroa, but less than three per cent of them are actually from Dunedin.

‘‘On average, about 150,000 people come through the centre every year, but only about 2.5 per cent of them are Dunedin residents,'' Mr Inder said.

‘‘We only tend to see Dunedin people when they have out of town visitors.''

Mr Inder said, of the centre's remaining annual visitors, 85 per cent of them were international, and the rest were domestic visitors from throughout

New Zealand, but only about one third of them took paid tours to the observatory, and even fewer to the fort.

‘‘We hit a high of about 170,000 visitors about three years ago and we've averaged about 150,000 since, but only about 1000 people a year actually come to visit the fort alone.

‘‘About another 6000 people visit it as part of a combined tour with the observatory though.''

Mr Inder said the centre's top five visitor groups were domestic visitors from outside Dunedin, Australians, North Americans, British and Germans.

‘‘We also get about 40 or 50 school groups coming through a year, but it would be great to see more [local] people coming out to see some of these special things in their own town.''

Among the things that made the Royal Albatross Centre and Fort Taiaroa special was an abundance of bird and marine life such as blue penguins, fur seals, sea lions, and the rare Stewart Island Shag, as well as the tunnels of the more than 100-year-old Fort Taiaroa itself, and the only working-order Armstrong Disappearing Gun in the world.

It was also the only mainland breeding colony for any albatross species found in the Southern Hemisphere and possibly the world, Mr Inder said.

‘‘Conservation at the centre began in 1937 and in 2007 we not only celebrated 70 years of continuous conservation, but the hatching of the colony's 500th albatross chick.

‘‘When the first albatross fledged here in September of 1938 it was still very much a one-man effort. There were three breeding pairs of albatross and one young juvenile then, and now we have just under 200 birds nesting here - that's quite a success story,'' Mr Inder said.