Saving Penguins In South Africa

It can be quite emotional. These rescues basically happen all around the year but for example hot summer days we can get several hundred eggs or several hundred chicks in one go. There have been years where we had over a thousand chicks at Sankop. We are currently at a level that we're actually calculating whether it should be listed as critically endangered. I'm Katta Lodinje and I'm research manager at Sankop and Sankop is a seabird rehabilitation center in South Africa. We see about a thousand African penguins a year. The general idea is always that penguins live in the cold that they live in Antarctica but there's actually several species that live in these kind of warmer climates. Historically I think there were several millions of African penguins in South Africa and Namibia. Obviously historic numbers are always hard to get but we kind of work on that. We currently have about two percent of the wild population left so numbers have gone down dramatically. There is some pictures from like 1906 or so from some of the islands along the west coast of South Africa where the island was literally covered in penguins and now you go to the same spot and you hardly see a penguin in the picture. We are currently at a level that we're actually calculating whether it should be listed as critically endangered. There are predictions that the species might be at least functionally extinct in certain areas by 2035. There's obviously a lot of conservation projects that are being carried out to save the African penguin and one of them that Sankop is heavily involved in is the rescue of eggs and chicks. Sankop has been hand-rearing African penguin chicks since I think 2006. These rescues basically happen all around the year but for example hot summer days we can get several hundred eggs or several hundred chicks in one go. So there have been years where we had over a thousand chicks at Sankop. When we think of climate change obviously the first thing that comes to our mind is heat waves and it is predicted that here in South Africa we will be more kind of extremely hot days on average per year especially when birds are on eggs or with chicks that they often abandon their eggs and chicks because they just get too hot and they need to go to sea to cool themselves down. If they're on eggs that's obviously a problem because a the eggs get exposed to the heat so they basically get boiled. The other problem is that obviously they get left alone so the predators have it easier to get to the eggs. It is quite stressful to be out in the colony when the things happen. I've been out in a in a heat event where it was a very hot day and then the wind died down. You see the adults first kind of going to the water cooling themselves down but the chicks can't go they're not waterproof yet and they start kind of panting opening their beaks gasping for air. They try to find shady spots but a lot of these colonies don't have really any shade and you're pretty helpless. I mean you kind of start I know we started with like you know spraying a few with a little water bottle or whatever or providing some shelter providing some shade and then you start seeing them just kind of falling over one after one. Quite heartbreaking. Historically the African penguin actually mainly bred in winter in South Africa and we have a lot of trouble with storms, with rain, flooding in some of the colonies. We have several colonies that are relatively low-lying so during winter storms part of the colonies actually get flooded by by large waves so we have a very very low juvenile survival moment so and that all obviously will get even worse with ongoing climate change. But there's also environmental changes that that causes changes in water temperatures, changes in currents. Previously the fish stocks were mostly along the west coast of South Africa. The majority of fish that can still be found in our waters is along the south coast of South Africa. We lose a lot of eggs and chicks because the parents can't sustain them. If there is times when there is hardly any fish around parents might decide to rather abandon their chicks. Our rangers go in and they take the chicks and they get taken to St Cobb and then they get hand-reared by our staff and then when they're old enough they get released back into the wild. They first get kind of rehydrated so they literally get kind of a tube down their throat and they get some some liquids and kind of some energy drinks and then they slowly get introduced to feeding and then they also start swimming which is something that is kind of special to to birds in rehab because birds in the wild don't get swimming practice before actually they leave their nest. So our birds have a little bit of an advantage because they actually get to swim and then once they have reached a certain age and weight they can swim an hour without their plumage actually getting wet so they're fully waterproof then they're actually being released back into the wild. And the nice thing with hand-reared chicks we release about 80% of them that we rescue. The first year survival is basically the same. The problem is obviously with with hand-rearing all these chicks and rehabilitating all these birds that we release into an environment that we know is not sustaining the population because there isn't enough fish. There is a very strong fishing pressure especially on the fish stocks on the west coast which historically was a stronghold for the African penguin breeding areas. The fisheries and the penguins or all the seabirds and all top predators are competing for the same resources. By installing marine protected areas or no fish zone it's obviously not only benefiting the one species there is lots of other seabird species that breed on the same island. I really hope that we kind of learn to kind of see the bigger picture. It can be quite emotional. Seeing them out in the wild just keeps you going. I mean they are just so incredible. Seeing the birds come back in the evenings, come ashore, feeding their chicks and that just keeps you going and wanting to protect them and make sure that they they exist for longer.