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African Penguins
| Date: |
08 March 2009 07:00 |
| Producer: |
Hein Ungerer
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| Presenter: |
John Webb
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
Penguins... We know them well and they've touched our hearts - in movies and documentaries. We've shared their lives and their stories, but few of us have ever seen one in real life. And fewer still know that the only penguin on the African continent is having a hard time.
These young birds [on screen] have no idea just how important they are to the continued survival of their species. They are in one of the pools at the Sanccob sea bird rehabilitation centre in Cape Town and they are nearly ready to be released back into the wild.
They arrived a month ago after their parents deserted them on Dyer Island, near Gansbaai in the southern Cape. The young birds were abandoned when their parents started moulting and could not go to sea anymore to catch fish for their chicks. When adult birds moult they lose their waterproofing and will drown if they go to sea. These chicks would have died had they not been rescued.
Deon Geldenhuys is the Conservation Manager on the island. He says this often happens to penguin chicks.
Deon Geldenhuys (Conservation manager): "The first year was close to 700 chicks we had to remove, the second year we went up to about 400 and this year was only about 60 birds."
At first glance, the figures seem quite low - just over a thousand birds in the past three years. But, Deon says, it has to be seen in the context of the dramatic drop in penguin numbers on the island.
African Penguins live and breed in colonies stretching from the south of Namibia all the way to Port Elizabeth. Most of these colonies are on islands dotted along the coastline. We visited a few of these to find out why the numbers are crashing.
Dyer Island in 1979 had a penguin population of close on 23 000 [on screen: "22 655"] breeding pairs. This dropped to 1 600 pairs in 2008 - a more than 90% drop in numbers in 30 years.
Today Dyer Island is a protected area but during the last century, in fact as late as the 1980s, the island was stripped of all its guano - centuries of accumulated bird droppings, which was used as fertilizer in agriculture. This had serious consequences for the penguins.
Lauren Waller is researching their breeding habits on the island.
Lauren Waller: "The soft substrate - the guano - that the penguins would burrow into to make their nests has been scraped away. So what happens then is that they are forced to breed on the surface and this exposes the adults to heat stress. So sometimes the adults need to go to sea to cool down and if they are incubating eggs or guarding chicks then those eggs and chicks are predated by kelp gulls."
In an attempt to alleviate this problem, a group of concerned individuals established the Dyer Island Conservation Trust which started installing artificial nests. They don't look like much, but for penguins, these contraptions are ideal.
Lauren: "They are fibre glass burrows that have been aerated and they're big enough for two adults and for chicks and so we're placing them in the areas where we know the previous season the birds were breeding."
Food is another problem facing penguins. The bulk of the fish stocks they feed on have moved so far away from their breeding areas that finding fish has become quite difficult in terms of the time they spend at sea. Dyer has been particularly hard hit.
Deon has looked at how long penguins stay away to feed on his island, compared to a colony on Dassen Island, off the West Coast.
Deon: "I think the penguins at Dassen had a 12-hour to 14-hour period of staying out where we have at least a three day - 35 hours [period] for the penguins on Dyer before they come back. And they are feeding in a 40km radius."
John Webb (Carte Blanche presenter): "This is Dassen Island, just south of the West Coast town of Yzerfontein. About 13 months ago a 20km fishing exclusion zone was created around the island, which it is hoped will provide the penguins with enough fish to feed themselves and their chicks relatively close to their nesting sites."
This zone could be the reason why the feeding time on Dassen Island is a lot shorter than on Dyer, which has no exclusion zone. At Dyer, fishing is allowed.
Dassen Island had 23 000 breeding pairs in 2005. Just three years later, this figure dropped to 6 000 - a loss of approximately 70%. This is why the exclusion zone was implemented.
Johan Visagie is CapeNature's Manager on Dassen Island.
Johan Visagie (CapeNature manager): "The pelagic fish... there has been a marked eastward movement since about 2000. And ja, without food you can't raise your chicks and it's making things very difficult. It's competition with the pelagic fishing industry."
The closure is still only an experiment and has another year to run before any conclusions can be drawn. However, if the penguin numbers on the closed islands increase or even just stabilise, then further closures might be considered.
Johan: "Probably more closures like the area around Dassen - maybe as they did in Namibia, closing off the entire coastline for just a few nautical miles from the shore - might work."
John: "Dassen isn't a very big island; it's a little bit smaller than its famous cousin Robben Island. But it's been home to marine birds and mammals for centuries. And while the number of penguins on the island today is a far cry from the days when they stood shoulder to shoulder, the Dassen breeding colony will probably show the way forward on how best to save these marine birds from extinction."
Johan: "There's been a 90% decline in the global population over the last 100 years. At that stage Dassen Island supported between one-and-a-half and three million penguins."
With those figures in mind, saving any penguin in distress becomes important. And nowhere else is this [more true] than at Sanccob, Cape Town's world renowned sea bird rehabilitation centre.
John: "Visiting Sanccob is actually quite a sobering experience, because it forces you to look at the huge investment that is made into every single penguin that is rehabilitated here for its life back in the wild. Saving the Dyer Island orphans was a huge operation. And it's not just about feeding them fish; it's about preparing these young birds holistically for a successful return to the wild."
Venessa Strauss is the CEO of Sanccob.
Venessa Strauss (CEO Sanccob): "Each and every penguin at Sanccob has its own identification number. And these birds have been through the rearing process for the last four to five weeks. We are taking a drop of blood... the vet will evaluate this blood for the red blood cells to make sure that it's not anaemic. We also look at the white blood cells to make sure that there's not an infection, and the general health of the bird. Later on we will also weigh them to make sure they have a minimum weight when we release them. And we also check their feathers... we force-swim them for an hour and then we look at each and every single feather to make sure they are 100% waterproof before we release them."
And although rehabilitating and raising penguin chicks at Sanccob is essential in the interim, it's costly - money that Sanccob has to raise every time there is a crisis.
Venessa: "To rear an African penguin chick is between R1000 and R1500 because the chicks stay at Sanccob for so much longer. Some of them we get in when they're only a few days old, so they stay with us for three or four months at a time. The biggest expense is obviously just staff and then feeding the birds. The fish is really expensive."
And you just can't miss the irony... these are the same fish that the penguins would be catching out in the wild, only now they are being caught and packaged - and sold back to the penguins!
Not all Penguin breeding colonies are on islands. There are a few mainland sites - some of them only populated since the late 1980s.
Penguin numbers at the Boulders dropped 30% in two years, from 3 900 birds in 2005 to 2 600 in 2007.
John: "This is probably the closest most people ever get to an African penguin...well to those that live in the Boulders Coastal Park in Simon's Town at least. This is a tourist magnet and close on 600 000 visitors come here every year to spend some time photographing and watching the birds."
The first penguins arrived here in 1983 and by the 1990s a thriving community had made this their new home.
Monique Ruthenberg is the manager of the Boulders Coastal Park.
Monique Ruthenberg (Manager - Boulders Coastal Park): "But they actually came from birds relocating from other colonies - island colonies - in the mid 1980s, the same time when False Bay was closed to commercial fishing. So obviously increased resources, good breeding place, obviously meant an increased number of birds for us."
John: "But their apparent abundance in numbers hides the facts. These little black and white birds that fly' underwater are in trouble and, seeing that it's us humans who got them into this trouble in the first place, it's now up to us to get them out of it."
To assist the birds to breed successfully, Boulders also made use of artificial nests, but the ones they used proved to be too small for a penguin family. Now the same nests being installed on Dyer Island will be installed at Boulders - also courtesy of the Dyer Island Conservation Trust.
Rob Crawford is a scientist who has spent his entire life researching marine birds and, in the process, has developed a particular fondness for these extraordinary birds.
Rob Crawford (Scientist): "John, in 1956 it's estimated there were about 140 000 pairs of African penguins. They are now down to about 30 000 or fewer, so we've lost 110 000 pairs over just over 50 years. So if that rate continues, then we'd lose what we've got in another 15 years."
Another 15 years - that takes us to 2024. So unless the decrease in penguin numbers is arrested soon, the only place you will see an African penguin is in captivity. Those seemingly endless numbers... gone forever.
Johan: "I think locally the people aren't really aware of how much pressure there is on the African penguin. We are the responsible party in this. Through years of over-fishing, pollution, egg exploitation of the sea birds, guano scraping... no, we are definitely to blame. We have to face up."
It's a hugely satisfying day for the Dyer Island and Sanccob staff when the abandoned chicks taken off the island are released. As a sort of parting gift, each bird gets a pink spot sprayed onto their chests. This will enable researchers and the public to easily identify the birds as rescued penguins during the first year of their lives back in the wild.
The question of course now is - just how secure those lives will be.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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