Cape Town - Thirty oiled-soaked African penguins, found by rangers on two islands in the marine section of Addo Elephant National Park, were airlifted off the islands by helicopter then taken by road to the Sanccob centre at Cape St Francis.
There is no indication of the origin of the oil. However, it may be from ships illegally discharging oily bilge water at sea, Sanccob said.
Some of the oiled penguins had chicks, which were not oiled but would have starved without their parents to feed them, so they were taken to Sanccob to be hand-reared. The chicks weighed just 500g each.
The oiled birds were found by a SANParks rangers on St Croix Island and Bird Island, both of which form part of the Addo park.
Louanne Mostert, marketing and development co-ordinator at Sanccob in the Eastern Cape, said yesterday the penguins had been delivered to the rehabilitation centre in four batches over a few days.
“It is really good that SANParks caught them so early. It must have been within a day or two after they were oiled, because they came here in good condition. They’ve all been washed and are doing fantastically. They need to get their natural waterproofing back and then we will release them into the wild.
“The chicks are still very young, so we will hand-rear them. They will be with us longer, about two months, until they’ve lost all their downy feathers and then we will release them back into the colony,” Mostert said.
Sanccob said hundreds of thousands of seabirds were affected by oil pollution around the world. The organisation said there was a significant overlap between busy shipping lanes around the South African coast and area with high concentrations of seabirds.
Juanita Raath, rehabilitation co-ordinator at the centre, said the oiling of seabirds was a chronic problem and a major concern for Sanccob.
“The number of oiled birds captured for rehabilitation is rarely an accurate reflection of the actual impact of chronic oil pollution on seabird populations,” Raath said.
The recent shift in the birds’ food source meant penguins had to travel farther from their breeding colonies to feed to get enough food to sustain both themselves and their chicks.
Sanccob said the extended time penguins had to spend at sea increased the risk of their becoming oiled, as well as reducing the likelihood of the birds being able to return to their colony if they were oiled, as they had farther to swim.
“The illegal and incidental operational discharges from ships and the possibility of wrecks leaking oil are a constant threat to seabirds,” Sanccob said in a statement.
Addo Elephant National Park manages the only two breeding colonies for the African penguin in the Eastern Cape.
Cape Times