Seeing the penguins of the Western Cape was very firmly on our agenda when we decided to embark on a trip to South Africa recently. The photo above is from our first visit to one of the penguin colonies along the coast, the one at Boulders Beach.
We were there in March and, as you can see from the egg in the nest on the left, it was the start of the breeding season. The barbershop quintet on the right of the photo is made up of five youngsters, just under a year old and still wearing their brown baby plumage. They weren’t ‘singing’ incidentally – penguins pant (not unlike dogs) to cool themselves down.
Boulders Beach is situated on False Bay, within easy reach of Cape Town. This means that it gets a fair number of visitors, but the larger tour groups tend to stay for only a short time and in between their visits it can actually be relatively quiet.
Whilst there are several hundred African penguins at Boulders Beach, their overall numbers have declined sharply over recent years and they are on the IUCN’s red list of endangered species.
If you travel eastwards from Cape Town along the Whale Coast you come across another penguin colony, at Stony Point in Betty’s Bay. The photo below was taken there.
Stony Point receives far fewer visitors than Boulders Bay and the much lower entrance fee here reflects that. In fact, you do not even have to enter the reserve itself to see penguins. They can be seen wandering around the whole of the area – like the four in the final photo, who seem to be trying to re-create the cover of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album.
