African Penguin colony faces extinction

Despite the care of conservation organisations which have banded together to give them help, even by providing them with nesting homes to shelter them from the sun and to hide their eggs and chicks from sea gulls, African penguins' numbers are declining drastically.

When the first full census of the species was conducted in 1956, 150,000 pairs were counted. These were what remained after "more than a century of sustained persecution, principally from egg collecting and guano scraping," according to BirdLife International. In 2009, only 26,000 pairs were counted, representing a loss of more than 80 percent, coming to around 90 birds dying every week since 1956, BirdLife said.

In 1979, Dyer Island - a low-level rocky outcrop of about 50 acres, or 20 hectares, in a bay near Cape Agulhas, was home to 23,000 pairs of penguins, which amounted to more than half the breeding population along the southwestern coast of South Africa. This year only 900 pairs have been counted. In this sad fate of the African penguin, too, it is the hand of humankind that is most heavily evident, reports National Geographic Online.

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