Phillip Island Important Bird Area
The Phillip Island Important Bird Area is a 20-square-kilometre stretch of coastline on the south and west side of Phillip Island, Victoria, Australia. It includes much of the Phillip Island Nature Park, Penguin Parade, Cape Woolamai, beaches, coastal plant life, and the Nobbies and Seal Rocks islets at the island’s western end. It does not include the north-eastern mudflats, which are part of a different Important Bird Area.
BirdLife International designated it an Important Bird Area because it supports more than 1% of the world populations of several species: up to 26,000 little penguins, up to 450,000 breeding pairs of short-tailed shearwaters, and roughly 52–490 Pacific gulls. The site has also seen visits by orange-bellied parrots in the past. The Nobbies hosts one of Victoria’s largest crested tern colonies, about 2,800 pairs, while beaches are used by pied and sooty oystercatchers and hooded plovers. The crested tern colony has fluctuated with changes in land use and tourism.
Penguin numbers have varied over time: about 200,000 in 1918, down to around 20,000 in 1987, and up to about 26,000 in 2011. An early account from 1902 describes a visit by Donald Macdonald. The penguin colony attracts many visitors and supports conservation efforts; in 1987, more international visitors came to see the penguins ashore at Phillip Island than to Uluru. Separately, Seal Rocks hosts the second-largest Australian fur seal colony, with about 20,000–25,000 seals, making up roughly a quarter to a third of the world’s fur seals.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 20:04 (CET).