Australia & NZ (Cruise) -- Nov 2013

This is the penguin preserve tour guide inside one of the observation areas. We stopped at perhaps 3 of these observation areas. I'm guessing they have 20 or more of them. They try to spread out visitor groups so as to not have continous traffic past individual penguins, which might upset them. It's also possible that, this particular year, no penguins chose to nest in a box next to some of the observation shelters. We saw a few empty nest boxes.
Looked like the nest boxes were arranged so that there were perhaps 3 nest boxes near each observation shelter, but no more than one nest box on any one side of the shelter.

In Antarctica the penguins (of different species that these) would nest in fairly large gorups (rookeries) with only enough space between nests for the penguins to be able to walk around without stepping on their neighbor's eggs (or babies). The nests I saw there were made of rocks (there was basically nothing else for them to use as a building material).

The penguins in this species apparently place their nests so there is NOT another nest in their line of sight. However, because of the bushes and shrubs (and the trenches and observation shelters in this partiuclar nesting ground) their nests can still be as close as 25-30 feet apart.

The charts on the wall behind the tour guide give information on the specific penguins visible from this observation shelter. Examples of a couple such charts are in later photos in this album. (IMG_5208.SX40A.JPG)