Sydney (AFP) – Australian wildlife workers have launched an unprecedented effort to vaccinate wild populations of little penguins against the highly contagious H5N1 avian influenza.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists a year flock to viewing areas and boardwalks to watch the diminutive sea birds waddle ashore and along the beach in the evenings on the eastern coast's Phillip Island.

The stars of this "penguin parade" are from a wild colony on the island, numbering up to 40,000 seabirds at the height of the breeding season in the southern hemisphere's spring and summer.

It is the world's biggest single colony of little penguins, which have a life span of about six years with habitats in southern Australia -- mostly Tasmania -- and New Zealand.

Also known as fairy penguins, they are the tiniest species of the semi-aquatic sea birds, barely reaching knee height and weighing about the same as a standard bag of sugar.

Now, like the rest of Australia's wild bird population, they face the threat of H5N1, which breached the continental landmass for the first time in June and has since started to spread in local wildlife.

The virus was detected this month in a Phillip Island penguin that had died, the first infection in the colony by a pathogen that has caused severe disease and death in birds worldwide.

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