Benguela Blues

Why are southern Africa’s iconic coastal birds facing extinction?

- Andrew Jenkins

The Benguela upwelling region extends along the south-western coastline of Africa, from Cape Agulhas in South Africa to Benguela, a small village on the north coast of Angola. It is characterized by a wind-driven process in which cold, deep water is cycled to the surface, bringing nutrients up from the depths and rendering the inshore waters of Namibia and western South Africa among the most productive in the world. Historically these waters have sustained a complex and diverse marine food chain, underpinned by massive blooms of phytoplankton – indicated by huge, mobile schools of small fish and most obviously expressed by an impressive array of predatory fish, mammals, and birds.

But in the past 100 years conditions in the Benguela have been changing. Anthropogenic impacts have escalated exponentially, the once infinite shoals of pelagic sardines and anchovy are scattered and hugely depleted and many of the abundant seabird populations that these forage-fish used to sustain have been reduced to fractions of their former glory.

Fifteen coastal seabird species breed within the Benguela system. Seven of these – African Penguin, Cape Gannet, Cape, Bank, and Crowned cormorants, Hartlaub’s Gull and Damara Tern – are endemic to the Benguela and six are red-listed as both regionally and globally threatened. Population trajectories of iconic species like African Penguin and Cape Gannet are precipitously downward (particularly in South Africa), with the penguin all but poised on the brink of extinction.