African penguins are facing an unprecedented decline; their numbers have dropped by 97 per cent in the last century. Francesca Page follows their plight and finds a population struggling to compete for food, space and attention in a society ignorant of how close these beloved birds are to extinction.
It’s late August in Simon’s Town, and spring is in the air. Pink flowers spill over garden walls and a warm evening breeze drifts through the streets. Underfoot, the pavement looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, splattered white with guano. It reads like a trail of signposts, and I followed it, camera in hand, towards a creature I had dreamed of meeting for years.
Locals call them nature’s tuxedoed comedians, and a symbol of the Cape. Like an investigator, I pieced together the clues and found a pair beneath a parked car, pressed side by side next to the wheel. One nibbled gently at the other’s neck, grooming its partner with the patience of a long-married couple. They often mate for life, and this pair, it felt, were expressing a long-held kinship.
We picture penguins on remote islands and sea ice, not on a street lined with palm trees. They seemed at ease, a few metres from my lens. But this was no postcard. Behind the charm, alarm bells were ringing. Something had gone wrong for them to be here. The penguins on that street were not there for the view. They were, in a sense, refugees.
My first ocean assignment as Storyteller in Residence for Oceanographic begins somewhere unexpected: not beneath the waves, but in the middle of an urban environment. Along South Africa’s Cape Peninsula, where mountains and sprawling cities seem to melt into towering kelp forests. Here lives the critically endangered African penguin, a species whose future is far from certain, but hangs precariously now in the balance.
A century ago, the waters stretching from Namibia to South Africa were home to more than a million breeding pairs. Today, according to the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB), only 8,000 remain, that’s a decline of around 97 per cent. In October 2024, the IUCN made history in the worst possible way, listing the African penguin as Critically Endangered, the first penguin species on Earth to reach that status. As I set out to uncover what had gone wrong, I would learn something even more sobering: if the decline continues, the African penguin will be functionally extinct in the wild by 2035. So how did we let this happen to one of the most charismatic and utterly adorable sea birds on earth?
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