Save penguins of South Africa — give them a home

There is a constant risk from pollution. The last big oil spill was in 2000, when 20,000 penguins were trucked about 470 miles (756 kilometers) from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth to allow workers time to clean up oil from a wrecked tanker while the birds swam home.

But even in years with no big accidents, the South African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds has to rescue and rehabilitate hundreds of birds whose feathers are covered in oil illegally dumped at sea and washed ashore.

The population fall continues, especially on the more remote Dyer Island where numbers have plummeted from 23,000 breeding pairs in the early 1970s to just 1,500 pairs. Penguins normally mate for life.

“It's horrible,” Wilfred Chivell, chairman of the Dyer Island Conservation Trust, who blames bad fishing management for a dwindling supply of sardines and pilchards, the penguins' main food.

Such is the competition for fish that Ruthenberg says young seals attack penguins to rip the fish from their bellies.

Gulls prey on the eggs and young chicks, often working as a team; the nesting penguins leave their eggs to chase away the invaders, while another gull sneaks in behind, she says. Eggs lie abandoned in the sand because the parents have taken to the water to escape the heat. Once a nesting pair abandons its eggs, other penguins often follow suit.

So volunteers calling themselves the iKapa Honorary Rangers asked the public to sponsor nesting boxes for US$20 each. They initially planned 100 boxes but this was doubled thanks to a US$2,000 donation from the Species Survival Plan — a cooperation program linking members of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in the U.S.

The nesting boxes are meant to give the penguins an edge — shelter from the heat and a better defense against egg-stealing gulls — and the 1,000 boxes on the more remote Dyer Island have proven popular, with 80 percent occupancy.

Now Ruthenberg hopes the Boulders Beach penguins that have lost eggs and chicks will learn the lesson and take to the newly installed boxes in time to lay a second batch before the laying season ends in April.

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