Needles for penguins

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I’ve spoken about bird flu finally reaching Australian shores. There has now been a report that a long-nosed fur seal also has the disease. Better news is that a team at Phillip Island Nature Park have now vaccinated 1,000 little penguins. The island is home to the world’s largest colony of little penguins and has around 40,000 of them. As they live in close proximity to each other, the disease will spread quickly once it infects one or two. It’s not known if the vaccine will stop the birds catching the flu but it will enable them to cope better if they catch the disease. As the penguins mostly return to the same beach each night and follow the same path to the same burrow, it hasn’t been difficult to channel the birds into enclosures. In three weeks time, the same procedure will be followed to, hopefully, give the same birds a second dose. The photo is free-to-use from Wikimedia but I don’t know if they are little penguins.