Of the many challenges facing southern Africa’s penguin population, perhaps the most unlikely derives from the world’s hunger for fertilizer, of which guano - built-up bird droppings - is an extremely rich source. From the mid-19th century until the early 1980s, nearly two million tons of guano were harvested from islands off the southern African coast, and, where these islands hosted penguins, the numbers of the flightless birds plummeted.
The reason? Penguins burrowed into the walls of dried droppings to make their nests, which provided not just shelter from the sun and wind, but also protection from egg thieves, in the form of the penguins’ opportunistic neighbors, the kelp gulls.
Exposed both to the vagaries of ocean weather and increased predation from the gulls (whose numbers are on the rise), island penguins have been on the verge of dying out. But on a 20-hectare scrap of land called Dyer Island, several kilometers offshore from Hermanus on South Africa’s Whale Coast, conservationists are working against this trend.
Marine Dynamics, a Gansbaai-based company that runs shark diving and whale watching tours along the coast, has created the Dyer Island Conservation Trust in conjunction with Cape Nature, the Western Cape’s official conservation body.
Through the Trust, people who are concerned about the penguins’ plight can participate in the “Faces of Need” project, and sponsor an artifical nest for a new penguin home on the island. The nests are made of fiberglass, and, once planted in the ground, are quickly colonised by a breeding pair. The pair’s eggs are sheltered from the sun, and their nest’s narrow opening thwarts hungry gull beaks.
Speaking on behalf of all Dyer Island penguins, SA Blog says - thank you!
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