Boulders Beach Colony: Part 1

After 21 hours of travel, Greg 2 and I arrived in Cape Town, South Africa. The flight to London had gone smoothly, but we were disappointed to find a disturbing lack of pints at Heathrow. We woke up long enough on the flight to Cape Town to see a vibrant sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Africa. As we began our descent, the rugged coastline of Namibia, with sand dunes stretching to the turquoise-blue waters and white pounding surf, came into view. The Northern Cape of South Africa turned to verdant hills of fields and wineries dotted with rock quarries. I considered preparing my resume to see if they had a need for any mine planning geologists.

South Africa requires no special visa for entry, so we picked up our stamps and headed south towards Simon’s Town. I can describe Cape Town as equivalent to San Diego, if the Superstition Mountains from Phoenix were butted up against it. It has a moderate climate and is relatively dry with the scent of the ocean at the edge of your nose. Table Mountain to the south was wreathed in a thin shroud of clouds, it’s buff tan rocky slopes bathed in sunlight.

Our accommodations were in Boulders Beach at Simon’s Town on the west side of False Bay. The settlement of the Cape by Europeans is a bit muddied, but it’s generally held that The Dutch were the first to settle the Cape in the 1600’s. A naval base was established by the British in the 1800’s that is still in use today. The Russian warship that was docked there during our stay reminded me that we were now in BRICS territory.

Boulders Beach is perhaps best known for the colony of African Penguins (also known as Cape Penguins or South African penguins) living amongst large granite boulders. South Africa National Parks has two entrances to the beach, one with a viewing platform and one with beach access where you can get up close to the penguins. The two entrances are connected by a short walk along a boardwalk that is very popular with tourists.

We were surprised to find the penguins not only on the beach, but in and on the muddy hillsides above in a dense brush of camphur and blackwood. The pungent smell of a colony is the first thing to hit your senses. Next is the loud braying sounds reminiscent of a donkey; it’s the reason they were formerly known as Jackass penguins. The braying (with it’s intermittent wheezing sound) is meant to attract a mate, while a haw or squawk is meant to find their partner. And there amongst the undergrowth next to the boardwalk, we saw our first African penguin in a nest. Nests can be small hollows in the ground or actual shallow burrows and are often furnished with small twigs, branches, leaves, or other vegetation. Conservation efforts have brought about artificial burrows as well, which look like half-buried propane tanks. The Boulders colony is rather unique in that it is land-based and relatively recent, having formed in the early 1980’s. The population sits at about 3,000.

African penguins mate for life. They’ll lay two eggs at a time and after 40 days the chicks will hatch. Newborn chicks are dark brown and very fuzzy. After three weeks they can walk and begin to form creches, or groups of chicks, while the parents go out fishing. They’ll start to lose their fuzz after about a year and a half and it’s at this point that they become an adult with all the benefits thereof: driving license, legal age to drink alcohol, voting rights, taxes, etc. Once they’ve found a mate they will preen one another to strengthen their bond. Although they look cute and cuddly, penguins have razor-sharp beaks for hunting fish prey and I have heard that their wings are strong enough to break a man’s arm (purely hearsay, but I also don’t want to do the research to find out). Penguins molt their feathers about once a year for three weeks. In the lead-up to the molt, they will fatten themselves up, as they cannot swim while molting. During the molt they are especially vulnerable to predation and lose about 40% of their body weight while new feathers grow back in.

We arrived just after 8:00 and had the place to ourselves for a short while. We watched as groups would swim out into the shallow waters of the bay, riding the waves of the surf and diving into the clear water. Seagulls and Egyptian geese would occasionally mingle. The beach is protected by large boulders and a high bank of sand that’s kept in place by blackwood and New Zealand spinach. We watched several males run off to the hillside to find bits of roots or branches and then waddle back home with it for the missus.

Like many species, African penguins once numbered in the millions. They were listed as an endangered species in 2010. In the last 30 years alone, the population fell 73% from about 42,000 breeding pairs. Now it is suspected that less than 10,000 remain in small colonies in South Africa and Namibia. They are expected to be extinct in the wild by 2050. Their demise can be linked to hunting (for eggs and meat) and for the collection of guano (bird poo) for fertilizer. The latter required the destruction of nests and burrows. Neither of those practices is a real threat anymore. Instead, the penguins face a host of new problems brought about by modern society. Dwindling stocks of fish due to commercial fishing tracks closely with the decline of the penguins. Habitat loss from encroaching human civilization and severe environmental conditions force penguins to nest out in the open, where they are more exposed to storms, heat waves and predation. Household cats and dogs, caracals (an African big cat), and mongooses find they have a penchant for penguin. And of course this list would not be complete without oil spills from commercial shipping, since African penguins became the poster children for oil spill rescue in 2000 with the downing of the MV Treasure off the coast just north of Cape Town. Oil inhibits a penguin’s ability to regulate temperature and in the cold south Atlantic waters can lead to hypothermia and death.

But all is not lost. A zone around the colony excludes commercial fishing, allowing stocks of anchovies and sardines to be replenished. The nesting boxes mentioned above facilitate breeding. Injured animals are rehabilitated and released back to the colony.

We spent a long time watching and photographing the penguins on the beach before taking another trail through the uplands to a second overlook. In the dense brush we found numerous hyraxes in precariously perched positions on limbs and scurrying about the forest floor. Hyraxes, or dassies in Afrikaans, are about the size of a large housecat, behave like a squirrel, and are most closely related to elephants. Equally as cute as the penguins, hyraxes are a bit of a nuissance and are not a protected species. In addition to the penguins, the park had seagulls, herons, Cape robin-chat, Cape bulbul, red-eyed dove, cormorant, African oystercatcher,and ibis.

After 9:30 the tourist population started to pick up and we headed to the beach access. A lone male sat atop a set of stairs in the sandy embankment, acting as an ambassador. We took pictures with him, kept our respectful distance, and gave him a 5-star rating before we moved along and he went for a swim. After scrambling through some of the boulders, we turned back to the house for a well-deserved breakfast after a morning with penguins.

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