Royal Penguins at Macquarie Island

The mean number of nests in the Lower Sandy Bay plots was 2.43/m2 (range at 95% confidence limits 2.32-2.54). The occupied area given for Hurd Point colony has been reduced by 5% from that surveyed to allow for two areas included in the survey which were subsequently found not to be used by breeding birds in the 1984-85 season. The variation in the difference between the lower and upper estimates of individual colonies given in Table 2 ranges from 17% to 50%.

This was mainly due to the extreme variability of the terrain and/or the degree of association with Rockhopper penguins. The number of breeding pairs calculated for the colonies surveyed through the winter was 487,932 (range 465,838 - 510,014). The total estimated for the unsurveyed colonies was 360,787 (range 294,100 - 427,475) breeding pairs.

The total estimated number of breeding pairs of Royal penguins on Macquarie Island is 848,719 +/- 10.5% (range 759,938 - 937,489). The dataset includes two text files (csv format) detailing the number of breeding pairs at each colony, and an sketch map of Macquarie Island detailing the locations of the colonies. The fields in this dataset are: Colony Area Range Breeding Pairs