First penguin chicks hatched at De Hoop Nature Reserve colony

Posted by David Henning on 17 November 2022

Two African penguin chicks have hatched at the De Hoop Nature Reserve in a project led by BirdLife South Africa in collaboration with Cape Nature and SANCCOB, where the teams have been working for years to encourage these endangered birds to roost.

Penguins tried establishing a colony at De Hoop on their own accord between 2003 and 2006, but after a caracal killed a number of penguins, the site was abandoned.

But the De Hoop site is important in establishing resilience in the penguin population by increasing the number of colonies and bridging the gap between the western and eastern populations, where there is a 600km stretch of coastline between Dyer Island and Port Elizabeth splitting the population in two.

The plan is to release 60 young penguins a year until 2026, re-establish the colony and protect it from predators. To get penguins on site, conservationists had to resort to some trickery to lure the penguins.

Penguins are more likely to adopt a site if there are already others breeding there, so conservationists had to make it seem as though penguins were already breeding on the site.

This involved placing life-like penguins as decoys and speakers playing penguin calls with the hope of attracting young penguins to the breeding sites.

Penguins were then translocated from SANCCOB’s Cape Town facility, where penguins were hand-reared from abandoned eggs or chicks to the De Hoop Nature Reserve. Watch the translocation below:

The project is proving to be successful with two African penguin chicks emerging from beneath a boulder at the site, proving that human-assisted colony establishment is possible.

‘I was watching the penguins out on the rocks and suddenly I could see this fluffy little shape near one of the adults,’ Christina Hagen of Birdlife South Africa, who leads the translocation project, told Mongabay. 

‘When I looked more closely I realized it was a chick. As I watched, another joined them from underneath the rock where they were nesting.’

Picture: Getaway Gallery

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