Everyone has a bit of nonsense stuff about them and mine is a love of Fairy penguins and Meerkats. Actually the only two things I can see about them that they have in common is that they can both walk upright and they both live on a continent starting with “A”. 

Fairy Penguins can only be found in a small region of Australia along the southern coastlines. They stand around sixteen inches tall and live in burrows. In Australia we always call them fairy penguins because of their small size but in New Zealand they can sometimes be called little penguins or blue penguins. It really isn’t important to anyone who loves these little creatures what they are called but it is terribly important that we humans don’t destroy their habitat because they simply can’t live anywhere else but where they are currently found.

Fairy Penguins can also be found in New Zealand and in Chile but they need a cold, desolate environment in which to live and breed. These fairy penguins can only have one brood a year and they make hard working, devoted parents. Fairy Penguins mate for life and both help raise the chicks and have a strong family bond.

Another interesting fact about these little penguins is that the chicks can’t recognise their parents so when the parents return back to their burrows with food, they get attacked by all the hungry chicks but they only regurgitate their food to their own chicks. Parents recognise the chicks rather than a chick recognising a parent. In nature, this is pretty unique and nonsense to us humans.

These fairy Penguins will swim hundred’s of kilometres to find enough food to sustain themselves and feed their brood. One chick will always be bigger than the other and they never have more than two. The fairy penguins usually come ashore at dusk in groups to avoid being picked off one-by-one by predators.

The fairy Penguin is actually a sea bird even though it can’t fly. Their main enemies are cats and foxes which can easily kill these little fellows.

Now the Meerkat doesn’t live in Australia. I can only see them on a TV documentary every Friday evening. I consider this my time to let my hair down and enjoy a bit of nonsense by watching a colony of Meerkats who live in the Kalahari desert on the African Continent. These Meerkats live in a colony that also lives in Burrows. Much of their safety is also in numbers and the bigger the colony the better their chance of survival.

Each morning these Meerkats emerge from their burrow and sun themselves warm. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of living in a desert knows that at night the temperature can fall to freezing. These little creatures come out, warm themselves up and then do some ‘housework’ by repairing the entrance to their burrow.

They are led by the strongest female of the group with only one dominant male who is controlled by the dominant female. A sensible arrangement, huh? No nonsense is allowed from this male as he is there only to assist and impregnate the female in her position of looking after her group. He is only allowed to mate with the dominant female and no other female in the group is allowed to get pregnant otherwise she is ostracised and sent away from the group.

So, my love of Fairy penguins and Meerkats is my nonsense stuff and I can only hope I never lose it.