The extensive non-breeding foraging grounds of the African Penguin

 

Due to a massive collaborative effort among South African and international scientists, the at-sea distribution of African Penguins Spheniscus demersus during the breeding and non-breeding seasons is relatively well known.

Over the past 10 years BirdLife South Africa has spearheaded tracking African Penguins outside of the breeding season. This has led to BirdLife South Africa now being in possession of one of the largest long-term datasets of non-breeding penguin GPS tracks. These data shared a shocking secret with us. The penguins ranged much further away from their colonies when they were no longer caring for chicks than we originally thought. They, now free to roam the sea, travelled beyond the boundaries of Marine Protected Areas and beyond existing conservation and protective management boundaries, to places we never expected to find an African Penguin.

We expect that the Cape Cormorant Phalacrocorax capensis and Cape Gannet Morus capensis will travel much farther from their breeding colonies in the non-breeding season than the African Penguin. This is because, unlike the African Penguin, gannets and cormorant can fly and thus cover much larger distances in shorter time periods compared to the water and land bound penguins. The non-breeding or ‘wintering’ grounds of the Cape Cormorant and Cape Gannet is a serious deficit in our knowledge about these Endangered species and is possibly detrimental to their conservation.

BirdLife South Africa’s Seabird Conservation Programme recognized the paucity of non-breeding tracking data as a serious impediment to developing effective conservation and management strategies for threatened seabird species. Although knowledge about the non-breeding distribution of seabirds is crucial for their conservation, the expensive price tag of GPS loggers has prevented us from discovering and protecting the non-breeding grounds of the Cape Cormorant and Cape Gannet. For the first time, the Seabird Conservation Team at BirdLife South Africa plan to track these species using sophisticated GPS devices outside of the breeding season but we need YOUR help to do so.