April 29 2009 at 09:27AM
By Jenny Gross
Neatly queued as if in a school assembly, seven bleary-eyed penguins look up at the veterinarian as he speaks.
While most of the 129 penguins rescued from the Namibian oil spill are on the fast road to recovery in a Cape Town rehabilitation centre, seven are weak and require additional medication before they can be released, says Tertius Gous, the veterinarian for the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (Sanccob).
Namibia's Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources has collected 154 oiled African penguins off islands spanning about 150km of coastline since the oil spill on April 8.
Unequipped to handle the rehabilitation of so many penguins, the department asked Sanccob to evacuate 130 of the strongest birds to its centre in Cape Town.
The birds have been recovering in Cape Town for nine days and, despite two deaths, the rehabilitation team has already seen significant progress.
"They are looking much more alert and stronger, (swimming) for 15 minutes at a time instead of five," Sanccob chief executive Venessa Strauss said.
Strauss joined Namibian officials to prepare the penguins for their 19-hour truck drive to Cape Town. Although wild penguins tend to hide even severe stress, the team knew the long journey, during which the birds were in close quarters, had taken its toll.
Researchers discovered a penguin had Babesia, a blood-borne tick bite fever, surprising because it was the first time this disease was found in a Namibian penguin, Gous said.
Sanccob planned to release the penguins off a beach near the rehabilitation centre in three to four weeks, and was confident the birds would swim back to their homes in Namibia, Strauss said.
Each penguin was marked with a metal identification band, and Sanccob hoped to obtain a satellite transmitter to track their journey home. The centre would do blood tests and check the birds' weights and feathers before releasing them, she said.
More enforcement and bigger budgets for pollution patrolling might reduce chronic oil spills, Strauss said.
"The fact that we treat 400 to 500 birds a year is proof that chronic oiling is affecting our seabirds in a big way."
jennifer.gross@inl.co.za
Source:
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=143&art_id=vn20090429053453494C364875
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