Cormorants A-Poppin'

In eastern North America, we're a bit cormorant-poor. Well, we have a LOT of cormorants, but the one we usually see is double-crested. Along the East Coast, great cormorants have made a beachhead from Europe. What a fine, huge bird that is. And in Texas and the Southwest, we can see Neotropic cormorant, a small rather delicate bird.

But diversity isn't so high until you hit the Pacific Coast, and then there are lots of fabulous cormorants. Same is true in South Africa. Visiting Stony Point was not just about penguins. For a big colony comprised mostly of Cape cormorants crowns the point, building stick nests on large boulders and outcrops. 

Here in Betty's Bay, South Africa, there were four species of cormorant for the looking.

It was a huge treat to see Cape cormorants scrounging for nesting material amidst the beleaguered vegetation on Stony Point. 

They're such glossy, beautiful birds, and a bit ungainly on land, with their totipalmate feet. Totipalmate means the webbing includes the three forward toes and the hind toe as well. 

It makes for some slip-slappy walking. Honestly, this bird is designed for water. Those legs! 

If I lived nearby,  I would rake up all kinds of stuff and bring offerings to the nest-material starved cormorants here, so they wouldn't have to go around tugging and tearing at the living plants on the Point. Poor things. They need a nice rasher of straw!

At first glance, it's confusing to look at a mixed cormorant colony. But soon, differences in the species begin to make themselves clear. In this photo above, we have mostly glossy black Capes with their red gular skin, but there are also some of the much larger and browner white-breasted cormorants mixed in. 

And in the photo below, a pair of rare bank cormorants occupies the top left of the photo--the displaying, yawping birds. We identified them by their steep foreheads and their size (larger than Capes). I believe the bird to the extreme right is also a bank cormorant.

In this photo below, the white-breasted cormorant in the center sticks out like a sore thumb--after you learn to look for it.

Sulking alone on a rock ledge was a crowned cormorant, so called for its little cowlick. It's a bunch smaller than the others, too. 

Also alone was a drowsy kelp gull, the species that has been such a celebrity in the Cleveland area this winter. How one found its way all the way to Ohio is anyone's guess. How this Ohio girl found her way all the way to South Africa is, too.

Meanwhile, a black-footed penguin fed its two fat, beautiful, molting young.  Gaaaag! May they all raise two young each year, forever and ever.

Next, we'd do a little botanizing and dickie-birding. Ready? Me too!

Penguins and People

African black-footed penguin colonies have historically been found on islands, thanks to a plethora of predators on the mainland. Mainland colonies such as Stony Point and Boulder's Beach near Simon's Town have become established only recently, when these areas were settled and predators like mongoose, genet, serval and leopard were displaced. Boulder's Beach's penguin colony, in fact, still suffers occasional leopard attacks from this most adaptable and secretive cat. The numbingly ubiquitous feral domestic cat is very bad news in a penguin colony, as well. (Where is it good news?)

To view a penguin colony is to see vulnerability on stubby legs. The birds are, of course, flightless; their wings reduced to stiff paddles for swimming. And their locomotion on land is heart-touchingly slow and awkward. They shuffle along with an endearing waddle that could outdistance only a tortoise. And they are much smaller than you'd expect, maybe 15" tall. 

The birds dig nesting burrows in guano or soil; in colonies of long standing, the "soil" is actually years upon years' accumulation of droppings, called guano. Guano "harvesting" for fertilizer harms penguins, for it removes the substrate into which they burrow, leaving their young and eggs vulnerable to predation by kelp gulls. In managed colonies like this, artificial shelters in the form of small brushpiles, PVC pipes, or boxes may be provided for the birds, greatly boosting their productivity simply by giving them a place to hide their nests, eggs and chicks. You can see the little Quonset-style huts and piles of brush, which are soon grown over by vines, that give the birds much-needed options for nesting. YAY for active management of such precious resources.

For Spheniscus demersus is vanishing, and quickly. It's estimated that at the beginning of the 1800's, there were four million African penguins. By 1910, three quarters had vanished, with populations estimated at 1.5 million. It gets worse. 200,000 in the year 2000 had crashed to 55,000 only ten years later. Projections have this species reaching extinction by 2025. Hey. Wait a minute. That's ten years from now.

Why should this be so? Well, penguins lay an obligate clutch of only two eggs, and the chicks take a very long time to become independent, so their replacement rate is very low to start with.  Incubation takes 40 days, and is done by both members of the pair. It can take as long as 130 days for a chick to become independent and fledge. All these natural history parameters aside, the big reason for the massive longterm, noncyclic penguin crash is us.  Homo sapiens in all his wisdom has not figured out, or more correctly, hasn't figure out how to care, that when we overexploit species low on the food chain (in this case the small baitfish called pilchard), we cause earthquakes all the way up the chain, in those species that depend on smaller fish for their very existence. Not for fertilizer; not for fish emulsion, but for life itself. Overfishing caused a collapse of the commercial pilchard fishery in 1960, with disastrous results for penguin colonies. Chicks starved in the burrows (something we also see with our Atlantic puffins thanks to overfishing for capelin, their staple.) This is something we are also seeing in the North American red knot population since we decided that the highest use for horseshoe crabs, upon whose eggs the knots depend for food, was to be ground up for fertilizer. We hope that we've reversed that idiotic exploitation in time.

Finding no pilchard, African penguins were forced to switch to anchovies as their primary food, a fish which meets their basic needs, but is not ideal for rearing chicks, being lower in nutrients than the rich oily pilchard.  So chick survival has declined, and chicks fledge thinner when fed on anchovies than on pilchard. The fledging period is highly variable, from 60 days to 130 days, depending on the quality of forage parents are able to find.

I'll briefly mention the massive oil spill on June 23, 2000, when the tanker MV Treasure sank between Robben and Dassen Islands, fouling the waters and 19,000 adult penguins at the height of the most successful breeding season on record. A massive rescue effort brought wildlife workers from all over the world to South Africa to wash, feed, and release the oiled birds, and (unbelievably) capture an additional 19,500 clean birds before the oil could reach their colonies. These birds were taken 800 km. east of Cape Town and released to swim back to their homes, giving workers time to clean the waters and shores before they got back in 1-3 weeks. An astounding 91% of the oiled birds survived, making this the largest animal rescue event in history, and a global effort at that.

The penguins would be in sorry enough straits without the constant threat of oil spills. We are witnessing an overall collapse of the penguin population, and as always, humans are the root cause of it. People are doing what they can to rescue oiled birds and encourage mainland breeding, protecting the colonies and offering shelters to nesting birds, but if we've taken their prey base out from under them, forcing the birds to swim longer distances for lower-quality fare, and negatively impacting chick survival pre-and-post-fledging, no amount of land-based management is going to correct the decline. Still, we try. We have to try.

I watched the penguins entering and returning from the sea. They're different birds in the water; it's the difference between seeing a seal galumphing clumsily on land and shooting like a torpedo through the water.

They're bullet projectiles as they swim; long lean periscoping submarines when they surface.

And on land, little gemmun in tuxedoes, I'm told; though I don't see people in the least when I look at penguins.

I see birds, probably the most miraculous birds of all, right up there with hummingbirds and swifts and ostriches for the bizarre array of their adaptations. Wingbones fused into paddles; blubber for insulation in frigid seas; barbule-free feathers that form a silky water-repellent sheath; a prodigious oil gland; feet way at the back of the boat like rudders, forcing an upright posture on land. What we see on land is not the whole story by a long shot.

It can take 12 to 22 months for a penguin to attain its adult plumage. This is done in a series of molts that take them from fuzzy brown natal down to the first juvenal plumage of steel-blue and white, and thence into the banded, pied tuxedo of adulthood. During the actual molt periods, which take about 20 days, the penguins are unable to enter the water, since their old feathers would become waterlogged and the new ones aren't waterproof yet. So they stay ashore and fast the entire time. And yes, they look about like we would if we were fasting for 20 days while our hair replaced itself. Which is to say:

Miserable.

Everywhere, the penguins were loafing, sunning, preening. Chicks were older; perhaps they didn't need such frequent feedings now. But it seemed to me that the colony was taking a breather on this late September day.

The lone bird would stride by, on business.

And looking out the colony, I saw cormorants coming into their nests, and, despite the fishy gag in the air, I wanted to witness that.

So I pressed on out the boardwalk, leaning into the fetid wind, to see more.

This little video will take you there better than my words can. I get the name wrong--it's Stony Point, not Rocky Point. But it's still Betty's Bay, and we're still in South Africa. Listen at the very beginning of the video, and you can hear the soft whistled whew whew whew of the begging baby penguins (the two blue and brown ones on either side of the black and white adult). 

Nothing takes you there like a video! Just sorry I can't bring you Smell-o-Vision, which is probably why Leon Marais got a unanimous "No, we're good!" when he asked if we'd like to visit Boulder's Beach's colony as well. Ha! We were ready for some less odiferous birds by then.

Smell aside, I felt intensely privileged to have visited a mainland penguin colony, to witness just a tiny fraction of their population and a few hours of their doings. I left hoping, but not feeling at all sure, that my children would be able to see them someday, too. That somehow the same humans who have pushed them to the brink of extinction could ensure they remain among the living, for good.

My First Wild Penguins! Betty's Bay, South Africa

African black oystercatcher, Stony Point, Betty's Bay

Years ago, when I lived in Connecticut, I was commissioned to create a sketchbook of penguins for  the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic Seaport. My friend Ed Ricciuti, a writer, recommended me to an exhibit company that was contracted by the Aquariium. It was the perfect marriage of job and artist. I got to go to Mystic Aquarium and draw their flock of 28 beautiful African black-footed penguins from life. I researched their natural history and made drawings that illustrated aspects of their life, from behavior, breeding and feeding to the threats posed by offshore oil spills. Black-footed penguin populations have decreased 70% in the last ten years, thanks to habitat loss, oil spills, and baitfish collapses due to overfishing. Ack.

Far more than just displaying penguins, Mystic Aquarium helps the birds in South Africa, as well. Each year, its staff travels to South Africa to work with wild penguins and the South African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds. Mystic Aquarium staff rehabilitates abandoned penguin chicks, oiled birds and helps bolster wild chicks--taking in weak or sick chicks and saving each precious one for further breeding and/or repatriation to the wild.

I was so proud to contribute my artwork to this display, which includes underwater viewing ports and a big station where you can watch these merry little birds torpedoing around in streams of silver bubbles.

from Mystic Aquarium's website

from Mystic Aquarium's website

Photo by Karen Kemp. My sweet grand-nephews Will and Max for scale!

My drawings were blown up a zillion percent and baked onto a score of enamel panels that line the exhibit. This was in the late 1980's, and amazingly enough, the panels still stand and look great today, through 25 years of rain, snow and shine.

So it was with more than the ordinary amount of excitement that I approached a colony of black-footed penguins in the wild. I had had the privilege of spending many hours with them in captivity. I'd even held a few. It's like holding a live football or a small tuna; they're like India rubber, dense and hard and very, very strong.

The first thing I saw was not a penguin but a rock hyrax, or dassie, as they're called locally. OMGGG!!!

These rotundly adorable animals (about the size of a Scottie) live in rockpiles and feed on whatever vegetation they can find. I was NOT expecting hyraxes. Hyraces. Dassies. These.

Hyraxes find their closest living relatives not in rabbits or rodents but manatees and elephants. They are a miracle of evolution.

And this one reminded me of a certain dearly missed Side of Bacon, baking in the sun. I know. You don't go down and kiss the brisket of a wild hyrax. But oh, I could have.

Soon enough, the penguins materialized before us. I was so thrilled to see a thriving colony full of older juveniles, still begging from their parents. The steel-blue one is a juvenile; the black one its parent.

This juvenile is in the process of molting out of its first natal (baby) down, and into its first juvenal plumage. They look like fairy penguins at this stage, but they're much too large. And those are in Australia and New Zealand, anyhoo.

The black-footed penguins nest under rocks and vegetation and in burrows they dig with their feet and bills. This colony happens to be just outside a luxury housing development; it's in a band between the homes and the sea.

Whosoever lives amongst penguins needs to develop olfactory fatigue, and quickly, for they are the stankiest of birds. They are as stanky as they are adorable and endearing. That's pretty stanky.

And there are lots of people living amongst penguins here. I had to hand it to them for putting up with the neighbors. Not only do they stink to high heaven; they bray, too, which accounts for their common name of "jackass penguin." Perhaps the fact that they're not in residence year round helps. I'd love to think that the homeowners take pride in their diminutive endangered neighbors.

The gale of that morning was still raging; the cold ocean currents hitting warmer water make for some wild weather around the Cape. Even with fresh air racing through our lungs, the stench of fish emulsion was remarkable. We remarked on it, a lot.

Penguins radiate excess heat via these bare patches over their eyes. A pink penguin is either very excited or too hot, as this basking fellow was becoming. 

I couldn't believe I was finally seeing wild penguins. I never thought I'd make it to a penguin colony, but I was very glad that I didn't have to cross the ocean to get to Antarctica to accomplish it. A bit of a landlubber, I'll admit.

More on Stony Point Penguin Colony in the next installment!