Battle To Save Penguins Facing Extinction

Female penguin on Dyer island guards a recently-laid egg

Dyer Island from the air











Penguin chick.







Battle To Save Penguins Facing Extinction

1:10pm UK, Friday June 26, 2009

Emma Hurd, Africa correspondent
Conservationists are warning that a rare species of penguin could face extinction unless urgent action is taken to protect it.

African penguins which nest around the southern coastline of the continent are under threat from commercial fishing and oil spills.

In the past century the population of the birds has declined by 90%, leaving just 26,000 breeding pairs left in the wild.

If the current rate of decline continues the African penguin, also known as the jackass penguin because of its donkey-like bray, could be extinct by 2024.

In South Africa, researchers are closely monitoring every penguin colony to gather data to present to the government as part of a campaign for fishing exclusion zones.

On the remote Dyer Island, off the coast of Cape Town, Lauren Waller and her colleague Deon Geldenhuys spend each day measuring and weighing the penguin chicks.

Every day we get penguins in here who are close to death because they have been covered in oil.

Venessa Strauss, South African Sea Bird Conservation Centre

Their condition reckoned to be a good indicator of the availability of fish around the island because they are totally dependent on their parents' ability to find food.

"We're finding more underweight chicks, and more chicks that have been abandoned," Lauren said.

Dyer Island - uninhabited by humans - is a protected site for sea birds. But the protection does not extend out to sea.

Fishing of sardines and other pelagic fish in the area is unrestricted which means that the penguins have to compete with the trawlers for food.

The researchers have attached small GPS devices to some of the adult birds to see how far they are travelling.

Dyer island home to African penguins

"We've found that the Dyer Island birds are swimming 40 kilometres to fish, and that is at the very limit of the distance they can travel when they have chicks," Lauren said.

Penguins mate for life and the breeding pairs take it in turns to find food while the other stays with the chicks.

The distances involved mean the adult penguins are increasingly vulnerable to seal attacks and oil spills out at sea, while their young go hungry back in the nest.

At the Southern African Foundation For The Conservation Of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) in Cape Town hundreds of injured and oiled penguins are rescued every year.

"Most of the time the oil spills aren't even reported, but every day we get penguins in here who are close to death because they have been covered in oil," said Venessa Strauss, the centre's CEO.

Saving the birds is labour-intensive. It takes four people to clean each bird, and they then have to be fed twice a day - by hand.

The penguins are eventually returned to the wild in the hope that they will help boost the falling numbers.

Climate change is exacerbating the problem, shifting the location of the fish and also making the penguins vulnerable to over-heating on the land.

Around the Western Cape researchers are experimenting with artificial nests made of fibre glass to try to keep the chicks out of the sun.

On Dyer Island the penguins have been quick to move into the burrow shaped structures, each pair closely guarding their new homes.


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