Stand on the St Kilda breakwater at dusk on a busy Saturday and you’ll see it within ten minutes: a phone flash going off near the rocks, a chorus of shushing from nearby volunteers, and a penguin freezing mid-waddle three metres from shore, unsure whether to come in. It happens most weekends over summer. It’s the single biggest point of friction between visitors and the small team of trained volunteers who guide viewing here, and it’s worth explaining properly why a camera flash is such a big deal to a bird that’s just trying to get home after a day at sea.
The short version is this: little penguins return to the breakwater specifically because it’s dark. Take away the dark and you take away the one advantage they’ve got against predators and against the general chaos of coming ashore on a rock wall next to a working harbour.
Why little penguins depend on darkness to come ashore
Little penguins, Eudyptula minor, spend the entire day foraging at sea, sometimes many kilometres offshore, and only return to the breakwater after the sun is well down. This isn’t a quirk of St Kilda’s colony specifically — it’s standard behaviour for the species right along the temperate coastlines of southern Australia and New Zealand, the only places little penguins are found. They are not, and this bears repeating because people still assume otherwise, an Antarctic or polar species. There’s no ice involved anywhere in their range.
Coming ashore at night is a predator-avoidance strategy that’s worked for the species for a very long time. On land, a penguin is slow, clumsy, and vulnerable in a way it never is in the water. Darkness is the cover that gets it from the shoreline to its nest cavity in the rock wall without becoming an easy target. Their eyes are adapted for exactly this: good low-light vision tuned for dim conditions, not for coping with a sudden burst of white light at close range.
That’s the whole problem with flash photography in a nutshell. A camera flash doesn’t just “surprise” a penguin the way it might startle a person. It temporarily wrecks the low-light vision they need to navigate the rocks, spot obstacles, and get to their burrow. Volunteers who’ve done years of dusk shifts here will tell you the same thing: a flashed penguin often stalls completely, sometimes retreating back toward the water rather than pushing on toward its nest.
What repeated flashes actually do over a season
One flash is an inconvenience. Repeated flashes, night after night, across a whole viewing season, are something else. Breeding pairs need to get back to their chicks reliably to feed them whole fish brought up from the day’s foraging; a bird that hesitates at the shoreline for an extra ten or fifteen minutes because it’s disoriented is a bird burning energy it can’t really spare, especially during incubation or when it’s feeding two chicks in the nest.
I’ve watched this play out over a few dusk sessions now, and honestly the pattern is pretty consistent: it’s rarely a single dramatic incident, it’s the cumulative disturbance across a viewing season that does the damage. A colony squeezed onto a human-built rock wall, a few hundred metres from a working boat harbour, doesn’t have much margin to begin with. Adding avoidable stress from flash and torchlight on top of the existing pressures — boat traffic, fishing line, dogs off-lead nearby — is the sort of thing that’s entirely within a visitor’s control to fix, which is exactly why volunteers push so hard on it.
The Victorian Government’s environment agencies and bodies like Zoos Victoria have documented artificial light disruption as a recognised issue for coastal and urban wildlife more broadly, and it’s consistent with what’s observed here at St Kilda specifically: light at the point of return is the problem, not light in general.
Torches aren’t a gentler alternative
A reasonable assumption is that a torch, especially on a dim setting, must be less disruptive than a flash going off in a burst. In practice it’s often worse, because a torch beam is sustained rather than instantaneous. A phone flash is over in a fraction of a second. A torch swept along the rocks looking for penguins, or held steady on a burrow entrance while someone tries to get a look, keeps a patch of the colony lit for as long as the beam is pointed there — which for a returning penguin can mean the difference between confidently continuing toward its nest and stopping, doubling back, or diverting into a different, unfamiliar gap in the rocks to wait it out.
That last point matters more than people realise. Penguins here are highly faithful to a single nest cavity, reusing the same one year on year with the same partner in most cases (though, interestingly, somewhere between roughly 18 and 50 percent of younger birds do end up re-pairing after a first match doesn’t work out — breakwater life has its share of complicated romances). A bird that gets spooked into the wrong gap isn’t just delayed, it can end up in a cavity that’s already occupied, or exposed in a spot it doesn’t know well.
What volunteers actually ask you to bring instead
None of this means you can’t see the colony, or photograph the experience of being there. It just means the gear list is different to what people expect.
Phones should have flash switched off entirely before you get anywhere near the water, not just “not used” — plenty of phones will fire an auto-flash in low light unless you’ve disabled it in settings beforehand. If you want a photo of the evening, take it of the pier, the bay, the group gathered at dusk; save the wildlife photography for a place where flash won’t do harm, and understand that a phone camera generally isn’t going to capture a dim, fast-moving penguin well in the dark anyway. That’s simply the physics of it, not a failure of your phone.
Red-light torches, where volunteers use any light at all, are the accepted compromise, because red wavelengths interfere far less with a penguin’s night vision than white light does. Volunteers on site carry these for their own population counts, weighing and banding work, and use them sparingly and only when necessary. As a visitor, the safest approach is simply not to bring a torch at all and let your eyes adjust to the dark, the way they would at any stargazing spot. Give it ten minutes and you’ll be surprised how much you can actually see.
Come dressed for standing still in the cold near open water rather than moving around a lit path — most of an evening here is spent quietly waiting, which suits the colony far better than a group constantly shifting and re-lighting phones to check the time or send a text.
Where and when to actually stand
Viewing happens after dusk, always, because that’s when the birds come in — arriving during daylight hours will get you an empty rock wall and nothing else. The exact window shifts with sunset time across the year, and volunteers on site each evening will generally tell you roughly when to expect the first arrivals. Our penguin viewing guide covers timing in more depth, and if you haven’t been guided through it before, it’s worth reading how volunteer-guided viewing works at the St Kilda breakwater before you go, since the volunteers on the ground are there specifically to help you see penguins without disturbing them.
Stick to the paths and viewing areas volunteers point you toward rather than climbing onto the rocks themselves — beyond the disturbance issue, the breakwater’s rubble-stone construction (it was built in 1955 as part of the pier upgrade, and the colony moved in entirely on its own afterwards) is uneven and genuinely not built for foot traffic. If mobility is a consideration for your visit, our accessibility guide for the breakwater is worth reading before you plan the trip.
The bigger picture volunteers are managing
Light discipline is one piece of a longer list volunteers manage every viewing evening: keeping dogs on lead well away from the colony, discouraging people from climbing onto the rock wall itself, watching for fishing line and marine plastic that can entangle a bird, and simply being a calm, visible presence so a nervous penguin has a predictable environment to come home to. None of this is new. Fortnightly monitoring of this colony goes back to 1986, when Professor Mike Cullen of Monash University began the long-term study that Neil Blake of St Kilda Council helped support, and that tradition of careful, low-impact observation has essentially continued in the volunteer monitoring that still happens today.
My honestly-held view is that most visitors who flash a photo aren’t being careless, they just haven’t been told why it matters, and a single clear sign or a volunteer’s quiet word usually fixes it on the spot. Where it becomes a real problem is with the small number of people who’ve been asked once already and do it again anyway, and that’s a different conversation entirely, one about the pressure a genuinely wild colony faces from being wedged into a busy, well-lit corner of a major city, a situation this colony finds itself in more than almost any other little penguin population in Victoria. The Victorian Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action lists light pollution among the broader pressures facing coastal wildlife in developed areas, and St Kilda is about as developed a setting as a wild seabird colony gets anywhere in the state.
If you’re planning a first visit and want the fuller rundown on etiquette and logistics beyond the lighting question, the tips for visiting St Kilda guide and the site’s FAQ page both cover the practical basics. Bring warm layers, bring patience, leave the torch and the flash at home, and you’ll get a far better look at the colony than anyone fumbling with their phone settings in the dark ever will.
