African penguin

Name and taxonomy

George Edwards drew and described the bird in 1747 and called it the black-footed penguin. He worked from two preserved birds brought to London, probably taken near the Cape of Good Hope. Carl Linnaeus named it Diomedea demersa in 1758 and filed it beside the wandering albatross. Mathurin Jacques Brisson set up the genus Spheniscus in 1760, and the bird sits there now.

Spheniscus comes from a Greek word for a wedge and points at the shape of the flippers. The species name demersus is Latin for plunging. English also calls the bird the Cape penguin and the South African penguin. The name jackass penguin comes from the braying call, which carries across a colony at night. Several South American relatives make the same sound, so the nickname is not exclusive.

Evolution and relatives

The African penguin is one of four banded penguins in the genus Spheniscus. The Humboldt and Magellanic penguins live off southern South America. The Galapagos penguin lives on the equator in the Pacific. All four share the same size, the same colour scheme and much the same behaviour.

The four are easy to confuse in a zoo, and the chest bands appear to be the surest guide. The Magellanic penguin carries two dark bars across the throat and chest. The African penguin carries one, shaped like an upside-down horseshoe. Its bill tapers to a sharper point than the Humboldt penguin's does. Like all penguins, this one probably lost flight long ago and turned its wings into stiff flippers.

Appearance

An adult stands 60 to 70 cm tall and weighs 2.2 to 3.5 kg. The bill runs from 4.8 to 6.5 cm long. The upper parts are black and end in a sharp line against the white belly. A single black band crosses the chest, along with scattered black spots. The spot pattern differs from bird to bird, so researchers can tell individuals apart by it.

Bare pink skin sits above each eye. Glands there cool the blood, and more blood flows through them as the bird warms up. The patches therefore turn a deeper pink on a hot day. Salt glands above the eyes also strip salt out of the seawater the bird swallows. The black back and white belly form countershading, which hides the bird from above and below.

Males are slightly larger than females and carry longer bills. Juveniles look different again, with dark grey-blue to brown upper parts. Their undersides are plain, with no band and no spots. The change into full adult plumage takes about three years.

Habitat and range

The species lives in the Benguela and western Agulhas systems off southern Africa. Colonies sit on rocky islands from Hollamsbird Island in Namibia to Bird Island in Algoa Bay. Breeding now happens on about 24 islands, and the Penguin Islands take their name from the bird. Islands matter because mainland predators cannot easily reach them. Birds spend the day at sea and gather on shore at night.

Two mainland colonies started near Cape Town in the 1980s. One is at Boulders Beach near Simon's Town and one is at Stony Point in Betty's Bay. Penguins settled at Boulders in 1982 from two breeding pairs and built up to about 3,000 birds. A ban on pelagic trawling in False Bay left more fish and helped that growth. Leopards have attacked the Betty's Bay colony, which shows the risk of a mainland site.

No colony exists outside the southwest coast of Africa. Young birds sometimes wander well beyond the normal range. Zoos across the world hold breeding groups, because the bird does not need cold air. GBIF holds records from 19 countries and territories, which include those captive birds.

Diet and feeding

African penguins hunt small fish that swim in shoals. Sardines, anchovies, horse mackerel and round herrings make up most of the catch. Squid and small crustaceans such as krill and shrimps fill out the diet. A bird may eat up to 540 grams of prey a day. That figure passes 1 kg when a pair is feeding older chicks.

Hunting appears to mean diving, not flying. A normal dive reaches about 25 metres and lasts 69 seconds. The deepest recorded dive reached 130 m and the longest lasted 275 seconds. The bird can swim at close to 20 km/h when chasing fish. Penguins usually stay within 20 km of the shore.

A foraging trip on the west coast covers 30 to 70 km. On the south coast the average trip runs to about 110 km. Sardines have declined near the colonies, so the birds now eat more anchovies. Anchovies carry less fat and protein, so the swap costs the birds condition. Parents will not starve themselves for a brood, so chicks die first when fish are scarce.

Behaviour and social life

African penguins live in colonies and do almost everything in company. They gather on shore overnight and pass most of the daylight hours hunting at sea. Pairs preen each other, which is the only way a penguin can clean its own head and neck. Allopreening tidies the feathers and strips off ticks and other parasites. A lone bird has to scratch at its head with its feet instead.

Birds bathe a few metres offshore, shaking hard and working the feathers with bill and feet. On hot days they slip into the water simply to cool down. Fights break out over nest sites and mates. A fighting penguin grips a rival's back with its bill and beats it with both flippers. Chases probably run right through a colony while other birds stand aside.

Communication and senses

The braying call gave the bird its old nickname. Researchers name three calls: the bray, the yell and the haw. The yell is a contact call and warns another colony member off a patch of ground. The bray is a display call, used to attract a mate and to keep a pair in touch. The haw passes between partners when one is ashore and the other is in the water.

Posture appears to carry as much information as sound. A male swings his head to claim a nest site, to draw a female and to warn other males. A pair then stretches necks and heads upward while giving a harsh call together. Bowing follows, with the bill pointed at the nest or at the partner's feet. Displays also let a parent and a chick find each other in a crowded colony.

Reproduction and life cycle

African penguins are monogamous and return to the same nest site year after year. Nesting peaks from March to May in South Africa and from November to December in Namibia. Females first breed at about four years old and males at about five. A female stays fertile for roughly ten years. Birds prefer to breed in winter, when the ground is cooler.

The best nest is a burrow dug into a layer of guano, which holds a steady temperature. People mined that guano for fertiliser, so the material has gone from many islands. Birds now dig into sand, shelter under rocks and bushes, or use nest boxes. Trials on Robben Island found that birds in nest boxes raised more chicks than birds in the open. An egg left in full sun is abandoned, and an abandoned egg never hatches.

A clutch holds two eggs, each three or four times the size of a hen's egg. Both parents share the sitting equally for about 40 days. A bare patch of skin on the belly presses warmth straight onto the eggs. Chicks hatch at about 103 grams and are fed by regurgitation for around a month.

One parent guards the chicks for that first month. The chicks then join a creche while both parents fish all day. Fledging comes between 60 and 130 days, depending on how much food there is. Young birds go to sea alone for one to nearly two years, then come home to moult into adult plumage. A moulting penguin cannot swim for food and fasts for about three weeks.

Predators and threats

Sharks and fur seals take adult penguins at sea. Kelp gulls, sacred ibises, Cape genets, mongooses and caracals take eggs and chicks on land. Feral cats and dogs add to the loss at some colonies. Birds forced to nest in the open lose far more young than birds in burrows or boxes.

Cape fur seals now seem to be a problem of conservation's own making. Work to build seal numbers up succeeded, and rogue seals now kill penguins at Namibian colonies. Dyer Island faces the same pressure in South Africa. Culling problem seals at Mercury Island was followed by a rise in penguin numbers.

Oil appears to be the other old enemy. Records of oiled African penguins go back to the 1930s. The MV Apollo Sea sank in 1994, and fewer than half of the 10,000 cleaned birds survived. Blood parasites and avian malaria kill many birds brought inland for treatment. Avian malaria accounts for 27 percent of deaths among rehabilitated penguins each year.

Population and conservation

The fall of this species appears to be one of the steepest recorded for any seabird. About 1.5 million birds were counted in 1910, and only a tenth of those were left by 2000. The total population dropped to about 150,000 to 180,000 in 2000 and to 55,000 by 2010. Breeding pairs fell to about 20,850 in 2019 and below 10,000 in 2023. The IUCN listed the species as Critically Endangered in 2024, with about 19,800 mature birds left.

Fishing is the main cause of the collapse. Commercial boats take the sardines and anchovies the birds need, so penguins travel further for worse food. Closing waters near Robben Island to fishing for three years raised breeding success sharply. South Africa kept only limited trial closures, and conservation groups went to court. A settlement in March 2025 closed the water around six important colonies to fishing all year.

SANCCOB has run seabird rescue in South Africa since November 1968. It has treated more than 85,000 seabirds and handled about 750 oiled penguins a year from 1990 to 2005. A 2003 model found the population 19 percent larger than it would be without that work. Naturalists have logged 6429 observations of the species on iNaturalist. Zoos in Europe and the United States run coordinated breeding programmes as a backup population.

Relationship with humans

People appear to have taken from this bird for two centuries before they gave anything back. Penguin eggs were treated as a delicacy and were still sold in the 1970s. Collectors smashed the eggs they found so that only fresh ones reached the market. Some 12,000 eggs were taken from Dassen Island in 1953 alone. Guano miners stripped the islands of the layer the birds dug their burrows in.

The MV Treasure sank near Cape Town on 23 June 2000 and oiled 19,000 adult penguins. Workers also moved 19,500 clean birds about 800 kilometres east so the oil could be cleared. Tens of thousands of volunteers joined the effort, which ran for more than three months. More than 91 percent of the birds were cleaned and released, the largest animal rescue on record.

Tourism is probably the main way most people meet the species now. Boardwalks at Boulders Beach bring visitors within a few metres of the birds. The penguins there let people approach to about a metre. The colony at Simon's Town holds over 2000 birds and is the main viewing site. Swimming is allowed only on the beaches next to the colony.

In culture and myth

The African penguin appears to have no old body of myth, because Europeans met it late and local peoples lived inland. Its oldest cultural mark seems to be a sailors' joke. Crews rounding the Cape heard the braying call and named the bird after a donkey. George Edwards fixed the other old name, the black-footed penguin, in 1747. Both names appear to be in use in South Africa today.

The modern meaning of the bird appears to be conservation. The MV Treasure rescue in 2000 became a national story in South Africa. A retired naval officer known as Van the Penguin Man helped the Boulders colony take hold. At De Hoop Nature Reserve, SANCCOB set out lifelike models and played penguin calls to draw birds in. The penguins carried Boulders Beach to second place in the 2024 Golden Beach Awards.

In Western popular culture the penguin appears to read as a comic figure in a dinner suit. That image probably comes from film and cartoon rather than from any wild bird. The African penguin is the species most zoo visitors see, so it carries much of that image. Its real story is harder than the image, because the wild population may not last the century.