Conserving African Penguins

Conserving African Penguins

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If you want to be sure of catching a glimpse of Africa’s only regular penguin species, you have to brave snaking queues of buses and throngs of tourists at Boulders Beach, near Simon’s Town, or at Stony Point, in Betty’s Bay. The stronghold of the African Penguin lies along the south-western coastline of South Africa, but the colonies of today are a far cry from those of the past; the population has plummeted from several million in the 1900s to fewer than 18 000 pairs today. The harvesting of eggs and extraction of guano on the islands where penguins bred wreaked havoc on the birds until these practices were banned in the 1970s. By then a new threat had emerged in the form of industrialised fishing for the penguins’ main food source, sardines and anchovies. With advances in gear and technology, the sardine and anchovy fishery became the mainstay of the South African fishing economy and more than 600 000 tonnes of these small fish were extracted from the bountiful waters of the cold Benguela Current each year. Although the tonnage of fish caught has subsequently decreased as fisheries management has improved, the penguins are again under pressure because the core ranges of these fish species shifted from the west to the south coast in the mid1990s. The reasons for this are yet to be understood, but the result has been a disparity between the bulk of the penguin population on the west coast and its primary food source. Increased predation and catastrophic oil spills threatened the African Penguin further and in 2010 the species was declared Endangered. The South African government instituted emergency plans to stop it from spiralling towards extinction. For a number of years now BirdLife South Africa and its partners have laboured to change the fortunes of the African Penguin. Our work centres on two strategies: to address the food shortages around