To save Africa’s penguins from extreme weather and heat, conservationists get creative

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As he patrols his colony, seabird ranger Gavin Petersen often sees the danger signs. Penguins panting, their beaks open, gasping for cool air. Abandoned nests and exposed eggs. Lethargic and emaciated penguins, their flippers drooping, too weak to flee when he approaches.

Africa’s penguins are in trouble, and climate change is just the latest threat. For decades, their numbers have eroded, largely because of overfishing by commercial boats that trawl the same waters. Now, the endangered birds also face the risks of extreme weather, from heavy storms to rising heat.

African penguins, a species of relatively small penguins with a distinctive braying call, are found only on the southern tip of the continent. At the beginning of the 20th century, they were so numerous that a single island in South Africa held a breeding colony of more than a million.

For decades, nearly half of their eggs were collected for human consumption – including for weekly breakfasts at South Africa’s parliament – and their protective guano was scraped away for fertilizer. Over a century and a half, African penguin numbers plummeted by 99 per cent, from an estimated four million to fewer than 40,000 today.

Recent efforts to guard the colonies and provide artificial nests have failed to reverse the trend. Over the past two decades alone, their population has declined by 70 per cent in South Africa and Namibia – the only countries where they exist.

Even as their numbers plunge, the waddling seabirds remain a big tourist attraction. The famous Boulders Beach colony, near Cape Town, charms as many as 900,000 tourists annually, creating hundreds of local jobs.

But the camera-snapping visitors often don’t realize that the penguins are in danger of extinction in the wild as early as the middle of the next decade.

Every year, their population drops by 5 to 10 per cent. Five penguin colonies have become extinct since 2005. Lorien Pichegru, director of the Institute for Coastal and Marine Research at Nelson Mandela University, recently warned that the African penguin is “perilously close” to becoming functionally extinct – which happens when their population is too small to recover.

Their fate is globally important because penguins are an indicator species. They are high enough in the ocean food chain to reveal the broader crisis in the southern marine ecosystem from climate change and overfishing.

As the scientific alarm bells ring, conservation groups are fighting to save the penguins, often with innovative ideas such as heat-warning systems and new colony creation.

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For rangers such as Mr. Petersen, every penguin is precious. He patrols every day, looking for penguins injured by shark bites or weaker chicks at risk of abandonment. “If a bird is injured, we try to catch it,” he says. “We’re trying our best to save what we can save.”

When he sees a penguin in trouble, he sends photos to the experts at a rescue centre in Cape Town to decide if the bird should be captured and sent to the centre, where it can be revived with a special diet of sardine smoothies.

Mr. Petersen works at Stony Point Nature Reserve, a former whaling station about 90 kilometres southeast of Cape Town. Its penguin colony, which began in the 1980s, is one of the newest in South Africa and widely seen as a success story, with about 1,600 breeding pairs. But even here the risks are high. Nests are often abandoned when penguins are forced to return to the ocean to cool down.

“Sometimes we have quite a big total of abandonments of eggs,” Mr. Peterson says. “The adults stay on the eggs until there’s a certain heat. If they can’t stay any longer, they go into the water.”

African penguins traditionally used a protective layer of guano to insulate their nests from the elements – but humans scraped away most of the guano to use as fertilizer in the last century, leaving the nests exposed to heat and storms. And climate change is heightening both of those threats.

“High temperatures frequently expose the birds to severe heat stress, causing adults to abandon their nests and resulting in the mortality of eggs and chicks,” the latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned this year in a section on African penguins.

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A recent study by two South African zoologists, published in October, used video cameras to measure the panting of penguins. It found that penguins can suffer heat stress in exposed nests when temperatures are 22 degrees or more. Temperatures can climb even higher – 40 degrees or more – in the artificial cement nests that were installed at many colonies in the past.

When heat forces the birds from their nests, Mr. Petersen takes the eggs to an incubator to try to keep them alive.

Conservationists are launching an early-warning system at some colonies, using temperature data from weather stations and penguin nests to monitor when to remove eggs and penguins from their nests to save them from heat stress.

But heat is just one of many threats.

Penguins are often emaciated from a lack of fish around their colonies, caused largely by commercial overfishing but also by changes in ocean temperatures linked to climate change. Their main food sources, sardines and anchovies, have drifted away from most of the colonies.

“When there’s not enough fish around, the penguins are underweight,” Mr. Petersen says. “Some of them just sit in one place. When you walk up to them, they’ll just sit there, because they don’t have stamina or reactions. They sit with their head down, their flippers on the ground.”

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To measure the threat, scientists have set up a weigh scale at Stony Point on a popular penguin path between their nests and the ocean. Microchipped penguins are automatically weighed before they enter the ocean and after they return, to measure the success of their fishing.

It is too early to analyze the data, but the decline in available fish has been clear for many years. This year, the South African government imposed a temporary closure on sardine and anchovy fishing in an attempt to help the penguins, but experts say the closure was so late in the fishing season that it will do little to help the endangered birds.

“We’re seeing more skinny penguins or emaciated ones, particularly juveniles and fledglings,” said David Roberts, a veterinarian at the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, known as SANCCOB, which runs a rescue service for seabirds.

“They have nothing else wrong with them, but they’re not able to find enough food in the wild. There always were some with injuries that couldn’t feed themselves, but now we’re seeing penguins with nothing else wrong with them – they’re just not able to find food.”

When emaciated penguins are spotted and rescued, Dr. Roberts and others at SANCCOB can often save them, first by rehydrating them with a syringe or drip therapy, and then slowly introducing them to an easily digested blended fish formula.

“But there are lots of others that we don’t find that will die of starvation,” he told The Globe and Mail. “Many die at sea.”

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Chick abandonment is another problem. The rescue centre sometimes gets as many as 500 abandoned chicks in the span of a few months. And then there’s the rising damage caused by extreme weather. Heavy rain and storm surges can destroy large numbers of penguin nests on low-lying islands, drowning the chicks or leaving them so cold and wet that they die from exposure.

Earlier this year, Dr. Roberts was doing field work on an island in Algoa Bay, in Eastern Cape province, when the island was hit by two days of rain. The island flooded and about 50 penguin chicks died. “Even just a few days of excessive rainfall can flood the whole island,” he said.

Acutely aware of the declining population, the SANCCOB staff do everything possible to save every rescued penguin. Often the birds are wounded by bites from sharks or seals, which itself could be a sign of the ocean crisis, since these predators would normally prefer other prey if fish were available.

“We’re putting our whole life’s work into looking after these birds – hours of surgeries, or days and days of intensive care of emaciated birds,” Dr. Roberts said. “It gets frustrating. The most frustrating is the ecological catastrophe. No matter what we do here, the penguin numbers are still dropping. It’s all linked to a collapse of the ocean ecosystem, and that’s caused by pollution, changes in climate, ocean acidification – a lot of things that people have caused.”

Penguins traditionally nest on islands, where they are safe from land-based predators. But with the loss of guano cover and the decline in fish stocks, thousands of penguins have relocated to colonies on the mainland – where they face new threats, including automobiles, dog attacks or even bee stings. In recent months, 63 penguins near Cape Town were killed by a swarm of bees, and 19 were killed by dogs.

“If we had a healthy, robust population, they could deal with a few storms or bee stings,” Dr. Roberts said. “But because the population is low, and there’s all these other things happening, it’s a compound effect. They can’t deal with all of it at once.”

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Amidst all the grim evidence of a collapsing population, there has been one recent sign of hope. At a nature reserve where conservationists have been trying to create a new colony, there was a crucial breakthrough: The first two penguin chicks were born.

BirdLife South Africa, along with SANCCOB and other groups, have been striving to establish a colony for the past four years at the De Hoop Nature Reserve, about 180 kilometres east of Stony Point, in an area where fish stocks seem to be better.

They knew it was a good site, because a few penguins had already arrived there in the early 2000s to begin breeding – until they were wiped out by a marauding caracal, a lynx-like wild cat.

This time, the conservationists built a predator-proof fence to protect the rocky beach from leopards, caracals or mongoose.

Using trickery to attract the curiosity of passing penguins, they filled the site with lifelike painted decoys and a cacophony of penguin calls from a loudspeaker on a rocky peninsula. They also released 150 rescued juveniles at the site, hoping the young birds might remember the place when they are mature enough to breed.

Over the past six months, the conservationists noticed that several adult penguins had become regular visitors to the site – often gathering near the loudspeaker. “It’s a very good sign,” said Alistair McInnes, seabird conservation program manager at BirdLife South Africa.

Some of the penguins seemed to be in pairs, and two of them were spotted disappearing from sight under a rock. But no nests were confirmed.

And then, during a routine monitoring visit in late October, project leader Christina Hagen noticed a fluffy shape in a rocky area. “I was stunned when I realized there was a chick,” she said.

“On closer inspection, I saw there were actually two chicks. This is a very long-term project, and we hadn’t expected to see any breeding yet, but we are thrilled that it has happened now.”

As fish distribution shifts southward and eastward, the new colony could fill a huge gap in the network of penguin colonies. “It’s important to hedge our bets,” Dr. McInnes said. “The De Hoop colony provides a sort of safety net.”

If breeding continues, it will be a historic achievement: the first successful creation of a land-based penguin colony by conservationists. It offers fresh hope for the endangered birds, proving that new colonies can be created and perhaps allowing more to be established along the coast. It might not be too late to save the African penguin.

African penguins: A field guide

African penguin

Spheniscus demersus

NAMIBIA

Height: 67.3 to 69.9cm

Luderitz

Weight: 2 to 5kg

Lifespan: 10 to 11 years

Diet: Anchovies; sardines; squid;

crustaceans

Habitat: Cool (5-20˚C) coastal waters

on flat rocky or sandy islands or

mainland sites

Atlantic

Ocean

An important

breeding colony

at Bird Island

(Lambert’s Bay)

became extinct

earlier this

century

Lambert’s Bay

SOUTH AFRICA

De Hoop

Nature Reserve

Algoa Bay

Cape

Town

George

0

150

Stony Point

Nature Reserve

Breeding colonies

KM

Dwindling African penguin population

Total penguins

4,000,000

1,500,000

300,000

<40,000

1910

Today

1850-1900

1956

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS;

journal of wildlife diseases; adobe; aquarium of the pacific

African penguin

Spheniscus demersus

NAMIBIA

Height: 67.3 to 69.9cm

Luderitz

Weight: 2 to 5kg

Lifespan: 10 to 11 years

Diet: Anchovies; sardines; squid;

crustaceans

Habitat: Cool (5-20˚C) coastal waters

on flat rocky or sandy islands or

mainland sites

Atlantic

Ocean

An important

breeding colony

at Bird Island

(Lambert’s Bay)

became extinct

earlier this

century

Lambert’s Bay

SOUTH AFRICA

De Hoop

Nature Reserve

Algoa Bay

Cape

Town

George

0

150

Stony Point

Nature Reserve

Breeding colonies

KM

Dwindling African penguin population

Total penguins

4,000,000

1,500,000

300,000

<40,000

1910

Today

1850-1900

1956

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS;

journal of wildlife diseases; adobe; aquarium of the pacific

African penguin

NAMIBIA

Spheniscus demersus

Height: 67.3 to 69.9cm

Luderitz

Weight: 2 to 5kg

Lifespan: 10 to 11 years

Diet: Anchovies; sardines; squid;

crustaceans

Habitat: Cool (5-20˚C) coastal waters

on flat rocky or sandy islands or

mainland sites

Atlantic

Ocean

An important

breeding colony

at Bird Island

(Lambert’s Bay)

became extinct

earlier this

century

Lambert’s Bay

SOUTH AFRICA

De Hoop

Nature Reserve

Algoa Bay

Cape

Town

George

0

150

Breeding colonies

Stony Point

Nature Reserve

KM

Dwindling African penguin population

Total penguins

4,000,000

1,500,000

300,000

<40,000

1910

Today

1850-1900

1956

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS;

journal of wildlife diseases; adobe; aquarium of the pacific

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