The Boulders Beach penguin colony and the fight to keep it

The Boulders colony is young by seabird standards. South African Tourism dates it to 1983, when a pair was spotted on Foxy Beach, and says the birds came to False Bay from Dyer Island.^6,7 At the time False Bay was closed to commercial fishing, and the newcomers found food and nesting sites there.⁷ The SANParks brochure tells the story a year earlier, saying the colony grew from just 2 breeding pairs in 1982.⁸ The sources differ by a year, so treat either date as the start of the story and not as an exact line.

Numbers today also depend on who you ask. The same brochure says the colony reached about 2 200 birds in recent years, while Cape Town Tourism estimates the population between 2,000 and 3,000 birds.^8,9 Neither counts the other Simon's Town beaches the same way, and a count made in the breeding season will not match one made at the moult. What matters for a visitor is that the colony is large enough to watch every day and small enough to need care.

The colony also sits in an unusual setting. SANParks describes Boulders as sitting in the midst of a residential area while remaining one of the few sites where the endangered bird can be seen at close range.¹⁰ The national management plan notes that the urban edge and human presence at Simon's Town may deter land predators such as caracal and leopard.¹¹ That is an odd upside of town life, and it comes with costs the later sections describe. The African penguin colony at Boulders Beach is one small part of the wider species story that this page follows.

CapeNature says African penguins feed mostly in the open sea on pilchards and anchovies and small squid.²⁶ SANCCOB says commercial purse-seine fishing competes with the penguins for sardines and anchovies, their main food, leaving them hungry and making it harder to breed.³ Those are claims from a conservation charity that is also a party to a court case, so read them as one side of a debate, though CapeNature's own list of pressures agrees on reduced food.

The practical answer so far has been fishing closures. SANCCOB says the fishery no-take zones surround six African penguin colonies that hold 76% of the global population.²⁰ In a later court order, a Pretoria High Court order set closures around key colonies for a period of 10 years, and the order puts them in place year-round, including the full fishing season.^14,27 The aim is to keep enough fish near the colonies for adults to feed themselves and their chicks.

Why does this matter at a beach? A Boulders penguin that cannot find enough food cannot fatten up for the moult or feed a chick. The management plan says a fasting bird loses about 40% of its pre-moult mass during the moult.²⁸ When the sea is short of fish, the margin disappears, and the sight of a thin bird standing alone on the sand has more to do with the ocean than with the beach.

Tourism pays for part of this. South African Tourism says over 60 000 visitors a year come to Simon's Town to watch and photograph the Boulders penguins, and that the money helps conservation efforts through SANParks.²² The management plan calls Boulders one of the world's most-visited penguin colonies, with 885 jobs associated with it.²¹ The money and the jobs show why a healthy colony matters to the neighborhood around it.

Visitors can also cause harm. South African Tourism notes that cars, people and competition for breeding sites have pushed penguins to nest in unsafe places.³⁹ The plan records visitors leaning over or crossing barriers, trying to touch birds, and penguins killed by cars in parking lots close to the colonies.^23,25 The artificial nesting boxes seen from the walkways were introduced to reduce the loss of chicks.⁴⁰ Respect for those boxes and barriers is a simple way for a visitor to help.

If you want to go further, visit the hospital. SANCCOB runs tours of its seabird hospital daily at Cape Town and Gqeberha between 09h00 and 15h00.²⁴ You can see rehabilitation at close range, and the visit adds context to the sight of a healthy colony at the beach. On a day tour, remember that the Boulders stop lasts 1 hour, so a hospital visit needs a separate day.