If you wanted to meet a penguin, you’d usually have to travel south to icy sub-polar regions to do it. But in South Africa, charismatic African penguins have made themselves at home on gorgeous beaches around Cape Town. You can even swim with them.
Knee-high Charmers
Some of the best (and cheapest) entertainment around Cape Town is to be
had watching African penguins. With a bit of practice, you’ll start to recognise all the usual beach types among them – the fusspot mother, the macho stud muffin, the loner, the bickering parents, the besotted couple.
But just to ruin the illusion, every now and then one will lift its sharp beak to the sky and honk out a loud braying call – which is the reason they used to be called Jackass penguins.
Sanctuary as Times Change
These are the only penguins indigenous to Africa. Sailors rounding the Cape of Good Hope found them handy prey, and penguin eggs were popular culinary items locally and abroad until the late 1960s.
Now thousands of visitors flock to see them every year, and by far the most delightful place to spot them is on Boulders Beach in Simon’s Town. Bathers first spotted an African penguin couple on picturesque Boulder’s Beach in 1983. The penguins must have felt a little self-conscious, being the first pioneers on the mainland in this urban setting. Or maybe they felt at home at a naval base, with so many people in uniform, as dapper and neatly kitted out as they are.
Whatever the case, they laid eggs on Boulders Beach 2 years later. Word amongst the penguins must have spread fast. Soon many more joined them, mostly leaving nearby Dyer Island for the safer mainland, away from predating seals and kelp gulls.
Swimming with Penguins
Now there are close to 4 000 penguins at Boulders Beach, and the area is the only urban setting to be incorporated into the sprawling Table Mountain National Park.
The penguins, nesting under practically every bush or bit of undergrowth, have become remarkably blasé around humans, and bathers often find little rafts of black and white penguins swimming around or past them.
Van the Penguin Man
Before National Parks took over conservation duties, a retired Navy man, Hendrik van der Merwe (nicknamed ‘Van’), became the resident penguin protector back in 1990. It all started when he saw an injured one limping along Boulders Beach. He threw a shirt around the penguin (they have razor-sharp beaks and are not afraid to use them), took it to the vet, and from then on, plunged into a world of penguins.
Van spent far more time watching the penguins than most field students – and as a result, became much in demand by scientists and television documentary-makers.
‘I didn’t need a degree to tell when a penguin was sick or well. I also knew just how to pick them up. They would relax in my arms,’ he says. ‘I loved my years at Boulders. I still remember things like how the penguins ran up the beach one day when a killer whale came in close. I admire the fact that they often mate for life.’
Other Penguin Hideouts
Two years before the first penguins arrived at Boulders Beach, a couple had also set up home at Stony Point near Betty’s Bay. The population there has never grown to the size of that at Boulders Beach, but the setting is also lovely.
Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and many other South African political prisoners were incarcerated during the apartheid years, also has a large penguin population. This colony was saved under dramatic circumstances from a near disastrous oil spill in the year 2000, when the Treasure, an oil tanker, foundered off the coast.
Penguin Real Estate
Penguin populations are declining, but humans are rallying around t
o save this vulnerable species. One of the projects aims to provide new ‘homes’ for penguins.
When guano was stripped off inshore islands decades ago, it left the penguins without shelter from weather and marauding predators. The Faces of Need Project invites people to help sponsor artificial nests on Dyer Island for these penguins. Within minutes of the man-made nests being dug into the ground, the first waddling house hunters come knocking. Sponsoring these nests is an excellent way for penguin-lovers to give back in return for all the pleasure they give us.
© Penguin photographs are courtesy and copyright Chris Marais
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