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The plight of the African penguins in and around Cape Town continues.

The poor little-suited birds are extremely endangered, having lost nearly 97% of their original population, and a series of real-world threats keep depleting their numbers to a devastating level. In 2021, 63 African penguins were found dead at the Boulders colony in Simon’s Town after being stung by angry bees, while in 2022, two rogue Huskies took out 19 penguins from the same colony.

This year, a scoundrel honey badger shocked conservationists by killing 11 endangered African penguins at the De Hoop Nature Reserve African penguin colony.

The Mail&Guardian reports that seabird conservationists Christina Hagen and Katta Ludynia made the devastating discovery at the nature reserve in the Overberg during a routine inspection of the colony late last month.

“It was awful,” recalled Hagen, the Pamela Isdell Fellow of Penguin Conservation at BirdLife South Africa and the project leader, of the grim find.

“At first, I was in shock and disbelief. I just couldn’t believe what was happening when we found the first one and then I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a bit odd,’ and we just kept finding more and more. It took a while for the enormity of what had happened to sink in.”

Honey badgers are not the usual predators of the penguins – they are usually leopard and caracal – which made this situation all the more unexpected.

Hagen had previously spotted honey badgers on the project’s camera traps and knew they were around, “but I didn’t consider that they would be as dangerous to the penguins as it has turned out to be.”

The cunning creatures are known for their inventiveness and determination, and this one managed to get through the fence, which was constructed to keep predators away from the headland. The conservationists are just trying to make sense of why the badger would have killed so many penguins.

“As far as I understand, you get these reports of a leopard going into a sheep kraal and just killing …  like a spree,” Hagen said.

The penguins are naive to land-based predators.

“These ones were at their nest, so they would have gone into their nest rather than running away to the sea. The honey badger probably got into a kind of a frenzy because it seemed to only eat one of them and the rest it just killed.”

Although their name suggests they have a fondness for honey, honey badgers enjoy the hunt, too, and have been known to kill more than they can eat when they encounter prey.

 

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While Hagen and her colleagues gather advice and consult experts on honey badger behaviour and predator management, they’re also reinforcing the fencing area around the colony to protect them from any future onslaughts.

“We hope that this is a once-off thing that we can learn from and put better measures in place to protect them. We know that it’s possible for the penguins to breed and to want to establish a colony with our help. And so, we are hopeful that more will come,” Hagen added.

Since 2018, BirdLife South Africa, CapeNature and the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (Sanccob) have been working to re-establish a penguin colony in De Hoop.

Despite this “big setback”, all the conservationists involved are staying resolute in their efforts to protect the iconic seabirds.

[source:mail&guardian]