Phillip Island Tour & Penguin Parade

People watching the penguins arrive on the beach back many years ago

On this day we had a bus tour booked that would take us to the Moonlit Wildlife Sanctuary, Phillip Island and the main attraction, the penguin parade on Phillip Island.

They picked us up at about 1:30pm and we were dropped back off at about 11:30pm. The tour was booked through “Top Oz Tours”, who we had found on Youtube. The main focus of the tour is to Phillip Island to see the smallest species in the world of blue penguins and their parade out of the sea, which happens each evening after dusk. The tour made other stops as well.

Our first stop was at Brighton Beach where locals have these famous and very expensive “huts” or “Boxes” as they call them, made of wood and painted very colourfully. They seem just to be glorified change rooms, lol. They do not have electricity nor plumbing and some have sold in recent sales for as much as $400,000 each!
Next stop was at the Moonlit Sanctuary Wildlife Conservation Park. Its’ founder had the goal of showcasing unusual animals that roam the Australian bush, especially some local species that no longer do. So animals such as emus, various exotic birds, reptiles and of course Koalas, kangaroos, dingos, Tasmanian devils, wallaby’s, wombats and other strange mammals. There was a special show that the employees put off with various animals to educate the audience. We were shown a few different animals including a dingo and some exotic birds and we had a great one on one chat with a wildlife keeper employee about their new Emus. We had a cheeseburger and fries for lunch there.
We then drove on to Phillip Island after waiting on slow traffic to cross the only bridge that goes from the mainland to the island. We then made a stop at a park centre called the Nobbies, where we had a chance to walk around the rocky coastline of Phillip Island. There were some penguins in their burrows in this area that we got to see and also there were numerous wild wallaby’s roaming around. So many are nearby the centre that they have grown accustomed to the mobs of tourists that visit such that one wild wallaby was observed drinking water that spilled out underneath a water fountain and kids were petting the wild wallaby, like it was a dog, as he (or she) slurped up some free water.
The tour then drove us to the Penguin Parade Visitors Centre. This is an impressive facility that opened in 2019, replacing previous structures that dated back to the 1950s. However, locals have been taking people to view penguins coming home from the ocean as far back as the 1920s! Now, this is a sizeable tourist attraction with over 700,000 visitors per year. The Visitors Centre is a 50,000 ft2 building with outdoor viewing stands down by the beach to allow optimum viewing of the little penguins when they walk out of the ocean just after dusk each night. They come home from a day or more of fishing to bring food to their babies and reunite with the partners. In the visitors centre they have a board that lists the estimated count of how many penguins arrived on the beach the night before. It listed 366 for the night before our visit.

We paid for an upgrade on this tour for seats in the premium viewing spot. Once sunset came we were not permitted to take any photos of the penguins because it can affect their sensitive eyes. You are seated before sunset and await their arrival from the ocean. The crowd is abuzz as their arrival comes, they waddle from the surf in groups in range of 30-40, they slowly get to a high spot on the sand on the beach, they all stop and look around in every possible direction, checking to make sure no predators are nearby. When they feel the coast is clear, which could be 5-10-15-20mins, they start scampering, or sauntering in some cases, off the beach towards the hills and grassy knolls where their burrows are located. Some burrows are clearly visible nearby where we were seated and their mates are standing outside in our clear view, but others can be as far as 2km away from the beach! They were absolutely precious. We could see them as they were coming out of the ocean and up from the beach and some waddling along a path that comes right underneath and alongside the stands you are sitting on, such that we could have reached down and touched some of them. Their mates would be outside the burrows waiting for them, making squeaky noises to alert partner where they were.
Sunset this night was about 7:19pm and the penguins arrived just after. The viewing areas are open until about 9:30pm and after that as we walked along a boardwalk leading to the parking lot dozens of penguins were continuing their burrow seeking voyage right beside the boardwalk, going underneath, some running up into the hillside nearby and others strolling along the sandy trail, just like the tourists watching them! It was an amazing display to see these penguins in the wild, performing their natural ritual to return to their homes.
We have limited pictures of the penguins, as mentioned, no pictures allowed when dusk comes, although some people could not behave and were quickly told to cease with their phones when they attempted to sneak photos.

Below are some pictures from the day and some from the website (like the picture above) of the Penguin Parade Centre, that they encourage you to download and use as opposed to taking your own pictures: