About the Trust

Craig Potton is New Zealand’s pre-eminent landscape photographer, New Zealand publisher, a passionate conservationist and presenter of television series Wild Coasts and Rivers: Craig Potton Gallery. He became the patron of the West Coast Blue Penguin Trust in 2012.
Craig says he loves the West Coast more than anywhere in New Zealand and defies anyone not to love penguins.   As a young boy he remembers hearing blue penguins under the bach at Golden Bay, the sad thing is he says he doesn’t hear them any more.
The Trust believes Craig’s high profile and conservation values are a perfect fit with its work. Through his publishing company he produces books that are scientifically robust yet accessible to the layperson; through his photography and television work he helps the wider public to appreciate and enjoy the beauty and uniqueness of New Zealand’s landscapes, flora and fauna.

Robin Long grew up at Gorge River in remote South Westland and became interested in birds and her surrounding environment from a very young age.  After becoming fascinated with the local breeding population of tawaki (Fiordland penguins), she started carrying out surveys for the Trust at age 14 and has since counted over 1400 nests spread throughout South Westland, Fiordland and Stewart Island.  This helped to better estimate the total tawaki population.

Working for DOC in Hokitika monitoring birds, pests and vegetation for the past seven summers allowed her to spend a couple of months each year surveying tawaki and monitoring nests, as well as helping the Tawaki Project to research the 80% of the time that these penguins spend at sea.

She is now studying a Postgraduate Diploma in Wildlife Management at Otago University and plans to complete a Masters on alpine jumping spiders – a group of endemic New Zealand species we know nothing about.  For the same reasons she became interested in tawaki when they were poorly known, Robin is passionate about protecting other species that are generally overlooked and receive little or no funding.

In her spare time, she enjoys rock climbing, tramping, botany, a range of crafts, and has built herself a tiny house in Hokitika.

Jill Cotton was one of the founding trustees of the West Coast Blue Penguin Trust. She has loved nature since she was a school girl, bird-watching in the UK.
Jill came to New Zealand as a teenager, initially living in Christchurch. As part of her work with the QE2 Arts Council, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, she came to the West Coast in the early 80’s, working on venture capital programmes assisting crafts people to set up co-operatives.
In the late 80’s, Jill opened one of the first B & B’s on the Coast Road; back then there was no accommodation available between Greymouth and Westport.  Jill continues to live on the Coast Road and enjoys sharing the beach and dunes with blue penguins and bringing her creative and artistic talents to the Trust and the community.

Margaret Costello grew up in Oamaru before gaining a degree in chemistry from Otago University.  She first came to the West Coast in 1976 and has spent many years in Harihari bringing up a family and working at the South Westland Area School teaching mathematics and as office manager.  She and her husband moved to live full-time in their Punakaiki ‘bach’ in 2013.  Margaret is a keen tramper and became interested in the WCPT through participating in the annual blue penguin count.

Martin Abel brings a wealth of experience in conservation on the West Coast to the Trust.

Martin first came to the West Coast (Reefton) with the NZ Forest Service in 1979. Moving south to Hari Hari and then with DOC to Haast and finally Westport where he was Biodiversity Programme Manager until leaving DOC in 2013. He now lives Hari Hari with his wife.

Martin’s connection with penguins began in Haast in the 1990’s where he was involved in the tawaki breeding monitoring programme and population surveys. He did similar work in the Buller but with the Westland petrel. Having also done many years of seal pup population monitoring along the West Coast, Martin enjoys working with wildlife that like biting humans.

Since 2014, Martin has been the QEII National Trust’s West Coast Regional Representative, helping landowners permanently protect private land. He has also recently taken on a roll with Project Crimson, aiming for more native trees to be planted.

Suzanne describes a conventional start in life growing up in Tauranga, completing a degree in biotechnology at Massey University and a subsequent career in the food industry before leaving NZ for an extended working OE in Scotland.

After 7 years on the West Coast of Scotland, NZ’s West Coast called, and together with her partner, she took to sea for many years sailing (very slowly, many detours) back to NZ.  The voyage gave her a window into the mysterious lives of seabirds out on the high seas, and her highlight was the time spent sailing the penguin and seabird metropolis of the Falkland Islands.

Now a sensible landlubber again, Suzanne lives in a tiny house with a large vegetable garden on the Barrytown Flats where she enjoys growing food, the wonders of solar cooking, tramping and involvement in local environmental action and advocacy.

Suzanne Hills becomes our latest Trustee

Dr Scott Freeman has been connected to the West Coast Penguin Trust since its inception, largely through his work in biodiversity for the Department of Conservation.  He was also a Trustee for a while and continues to support and advise the Trust as our Advisory Trustee, bringing his extensive knowledge of coastal fauna to bear.

Scott is a talented photographer and his nature and landscape photographs often appear in publications of the Trust’s patron, Craig Potton, through Craig’s publishing company, Potton & Burton.

Kerry-Jayne Wilson devoted 45 years to researching penguins and other seabirds until her untimely death in March 2022.
She travelled the globe researching bird life in places as diverse as New Zealand, Antarctica, Mongolia, Malaysia, Newfoundland, Indonesia and the Cook Islands. She wrote four books, the most recent being Seabirds – A natural history, about 80 scientific papers, plus numerous reports and other articles.  One of the most recent and important was the joint report on the state of New Zealand’s penguins with Dr Thomas Mattern.

In 2009 she retired after 23 years as a lecturer in ecology at Lincoln University. She moved to Charleston on the West Coast where she worked as a natural history writer and seabird ecologist.
Kerry-Jayne was a New Zealand representative for the Australasian Seabird Group for ten years, she was a past vice-president and council member of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand, and compiled and edited the annual State of New Zealand Birds Report.

In 2012, Kerry-Jayne was awarded the OSNZ’s Robert Falla Memorial Award for her “work… in the field of ornithology and her contributions to the work of the society over many years”.

In the 2019 New Year Honours, she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to seabird conservation.

In 2023, the fossil penguin species Eudyptula wilsonae was named after her.

She stepped down as Trust Chair in August 2019 having been in the role since the Trust began in 2006, and, remained as Trustee and science adviser until she died.

Read more on the Wikipedia page.

Inger grew up in Kent, the garden of England, and says she became interested in conservation when proposals were made to dig up the fields that surrounded her town for gravel extraction.
After completing a joint honours degree in Geography and Geology at Bristol University then a Leisure Management Diploma, via various sports management roles, she managed a 220 acre estate and golf club just outside London, where she re-discovered a love for nature and sustainability, introducing and implementing an ecology policy.  But she wanted to travel and lost her heart to New Zealand when she visited in 2003.
DOC offered her a job in 2005 based in Fox Glacier and she subsequently worked as a Community Relations Ranger in Hokitika between 2008 and 2016.  She lives and works close to Hokitika beach with penguins living just a few hundred yards away and her other part time roles include Regional Field Advisor for the NZ Walking Access Commission and General Manager for the South Island Kokako Charitable Trust.  She is also Chair of Hokitika’s Green Team, seeking a more sustainable community.

Growing up in the outdoors of the wild west coast of Scotland, spending her time playing in the mountains, swimming in any lake, river or sea she found and wildlife spotting for hours, Lucy is truly at home here on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island. She finds peace and excitement in wildlife conservation and lives to see animals, unthreatened and in the wild. She has worked in education and  community roles throughout her working life and volunteered around the world with different species and her motto is “inspire, excite and motivate young minds, to ‘stop, look and listen’ in nature”.

Having been our education and awareness ranger for the past 7 years, she has now taken on the Trust’s ranger role, working more closely with our local penguins and being able to deliver the most recent news from the field, straight into the classrooms of the West Coast schools.

Karen was born in Christchurch and schooled there and in Wanganui. After completing her postgraduate Immunology studies at Auckland University, she moved to Australia with her partner for him to progress his vineyard management career.

Her experience in laboratory analysis led her to take on technical roles at various wineries in South Australia and Victoria, and then on to further education for her roles implementing and auditing Food Safety and Environmental Management Systems. This was followed by a year as Environmental Technical Officer for the Mildura City Council supervising their landfills and recycling centres.

After twenty-two years in the heat and dry of Australia, and with her three children then independent, young adults, she made the move to her West Coast bush block and put it under a QEII covenant to protect it.

Karen held a full-time Administrator position in Greymouth for eleven years and then left to teach music privately and to continue administrative services on a casual basis.