Honey badger wipes out 11 endangered penguins
A honey badger has wreaked havoc at the newly-established De Hoop Nature Reserve African penguin colony in the Western Cape, killing 11 of the endangered seabirds at once.
Seabird conservationists Christina Hagen and Katta Ludynia made the discovery during a routine inspection of the colony recently, finding the remains of 11 African penguins at the nature reserve in the Overberg.
“It was awful,” recalled Hagen. “At first, I was in shock and disbelief. I just couldn’t believe what was happening when we found the first one … and we just kept finding more and more. It took a while for the enormity of what had happened to sink in.”
The predation was unexpected as it had been thought that the main predators of concern for the colony were leopard and caracal. Hagen had previously spotted honey badgers on the project’s camera traps.
Honey badgers are “notoriously inventive and determined” and it seems that the animal was able to get through the fence that was constructed to keep predators away from the headland.
Known to prey on birds, reptiles and small mammals, honey badgers don’t only have a predilection for beehives as their name suggests. They are also known to kill more than they can eat when they encounter prey — such as domestic chickens or, in this case, penguins — that either cannot escape or are naive to the predators.
While it isn’t obvious exactly how the honey badger entered the colony area, the project team has already started improving the fence in potentially vulnerable areas.
“We’ve put more electric fencing in place towards the end of the fence, obviously it needs to stop at some point by the sea, and we’ve had issues with high waves, so we’ve kind of reinforced that section,” Hagen said.
Meanwhile, the speaker that plays the calls of African penguins and is used to attract penguins to the site is not running “as we do not want to attract additional penguins to the colony if there is the potential for a predator to get in”.
The conservationists remain resolute in their efforts to conserve the iconic seabirds.
“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 said.
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.
The chosen site is important because there is a good supply of fish for the penguins.
“Mainland sites are not readily colonised because breeding penguins are vulnerable to predation from terrestrial animals, such as leopards, caracals and now, honey badgers,” they said.
To mitigate this risk, a fence was designed and constructed in consultation with experts on the behaviour and biology of mammalian predators.
Penguins have been attracted to the site over several years using penguin decoys and an audio speaker playing penguin calls. More than 200 hand-reared fledgling penguins have been released at the colony.
In 2022, wild penguins arrived at the site and one of the pairs successfully bred. The following year, this increased to four pairs which, between them, raised six chicks.
The penguin activity, unfortunately, attracted the attention of the honey badger, which managed to get past or through the fence and to kill the 11 penguins that were present at the colony at the time.
The loss of the penguins is a “big setback” to the establishment of the colony, but it is not unprecedented when looking at how other African penguin colonies on the mainland started, the conservation organisations said in a statement.
The Stony Point colony at Betty’s Bay, on the Cape east coast experienced several predation events of similar magnitude as the penguins were colonising the area naturally in the 1980s and it is now the third-largest penguin colony in South Africa.
“We are committed to ensuring that we make this a safe breeding space for African penguins,” said Alistair Mcinnes, seabird conservation programme manager at Birdlife South Africa.
“We have shown that it is possible to attract penguins to a site and for them to start breeding.
“Once the fence improvements and other measures have been put in place, we are confident that more penguins will come.”
Over 200 penguins have been released, after being hand-reared at Sanccob.
The numbers of African penguins are at their lowest ever and they continue to dwindle.
The population has declined from about 1 million pairs 100 years ago to about 9900 pairs today.