It is the effect on paying customers that is at the heart of the penguin-watching debate in Oamaru and is easily solved, writes Bruce Comfort.
Hamish MacLean's long article about a single vociferous complainer who wrote to the Waitaki District Council and to Tourism Waitaki (ODT, 27.7.17) about illicit penguin watchers in Oamaru is going to do nothing to promote rational discussion about the issue.
Free penguin watchers have increased in number since the beach and breakwater access gates have been kept open 24 hours.
Many watchers are locals and their guests, and many are a great mix of ages and nationalities from around the world. The word has got out that the Oamaru Breakwater is a place where you can watch big rafts of penguins come ashore for free - big numbers because they are the penguins cultured by the Oamaru Blue Penguin Colony to use the nest boxes it has built, the tracks and walkways and seating for viewers, the Blue Cross Penguin Hospital facility and the planted and nourished trees that are part of a wildly successful commercial venture.
This venture grew out of a community effort to make wild penguin observation at night easy and less hazardous in an area used as a tip site and previously (a long time ago) full of roofing iron and timber and nails and junk and dangers.
I bet it rankles for people who have paid $30 a seat to see the penguins to see dozens of free viewers 80m away, watching for nothing, but I also bet that any noise the free-viewers make and antisocial behaviour they (very occasionally) may exhibit and the flashes of their cameras only annoy the paying punters and not the penguins, who have battled aggressive and angry fishermen, cars and trucks and vans on the road, little boys throwing stones, Chinese who are determined to get in close or pick them up and a host of other unnatural hazards, to nest successfully here.
We need to get over ''the effect on the penguins'' and look at what really is the issue, which is the negative impact on paying customers of seeing freeloaders getting an eyeful and being able to come and go at will when they get bored.
The mayor and Tourism Waitaki general manager need to see if the ''penguin passage'' up out of the sea and on to the colony flat and fences and nesting boxes can be screened from view, and then people on the breakwater will not upset the paying punters.
The breakwater is most likely freehold council ''land'' as it was an asset of the old Harbour Board (created long before today's suite of prohibitive/enabling coastal legislation was enacted).
But surrounding this freehold land, which the council has no obligation to grant any access to at all, is common marine and coastal area land to which we all should have unfettered statutory access. Safety cannot be called upon as a reason to bar access as CMCA land all around New Zealand has fatalities and accidents to rock-fishers and tourists on a daily basis. It's just part of the risk of the great outdoors.
But the free look at a commercial penguin parade should be curtailed - it simply looks bad and as if the controlling agencies have picked a silly place for the colony (not true of course) or have been unable to make the show private, as it should be.
A fence to block a view of the penguins coming up the beach is needed. And then the breakwater will not be a viewing place and can fade back into obscurity as a walk in the evening air.
-Bruce Comfort is an Oamaru resident with an interest in industrial heritage.
