P-P-Pick Up A Penguin,

was an old advertising line,  

for Penguin chocolate bars,

 and that is what is happening now to African penguins, (Spheniscus demersus),

but these are different, they are made out of concrete! the hope is that with help from Christina Hagen and fellow seabird conservationists at BirdLife South Africa to entice endangered African penguins to start a new colony near better fishing grounds, but penguins are notoriously fickle and often move back to their original breeding grounds, and the reason for the move? In the early 1900s their population numbered in the millions, but egg collectors claimed half a million eggs a year back in the 1920s, then guano harvesters mined the penguins’ island colonies for their nutrient-rich poop, without the guano layer, the birds couldn’t excavate nesting burrows, leaving eggs and chicks exposed to the elements and to predators, now, the birds are down to just 25,000 breeding pairs split between colonies on the west coasts of Namibia and South Africa, and far to the southeast in Algoa Bay, South Africa,

so the move is on, Hagen is positive about her plan to coax penguins into adopting De Hoop as a new home, “Science tells us that it’s possible and there is a likelihood of success, but I can’t put a percentage on it,” she says, if the decoys don’t attract enough birds in the first year, Hagen plans to translocate newly fledged chicks to the site in hopes that they will return to breed at, by then, a truly thriving colony, lead photograph by Chris and Monique Fallows/Minden Pictures, video and other photograph by Video by Roelf Daling, concret penguins who would have thought it?