Born to Fledge

When two penguins meet and want to make a family, they perform a ritual called “pair bonding.” They start by looking at each other and turning down their beaks, which leads into a dance and ends with a cuddle. There is the back and forth of the two penguins looking at each other, while only taking a few minutes, it results in a relationship that could last a lifetime. The ritual reminds me of a tango, since both penguins spend time dancing on their toes. If they lay eggs successfully, they will have penguin chicks which are literally “born to fledge”, meaning they are ready to leave the nest right away and can find delicious food on their own.

When penguins lay an egg, it remains shiny and new for the first 24 hours. If such an egg is found by a team on Robben Island, it will be labeled “E0,” meaning the egg was laid in the last 24 hours. After 24 hours, the egg loses its shine — but not its promise of a chick — and is thereafter labeled “EU”, meaning “Egg Unknown,” since it’s unclear how old the egg is. Both parents stand on the egg, and one is always on the egg, which we referred to as “sitting tight.” Once the chick hatches, the parents stay with the very young penguins at the nest until they are nearly ready to fledge.

Penguins will begin to sit on an egg immediately after it is laid. In contrast, other bird species, such as Guinea Fowls, wait until all eggs are laid before they sit on the eggs. Penguins lays one or two eggs per breeding cycle one a year. This causes one egg to begin development sooner than the other, with the first egg being laid referred to as the “A” egg and the second as the “B” egg. This explains why, in the wild, one chick is usually slightly larger than the other if there are two chicks in a nest.

When a penguin is hatched, its eyes are closed and during this time it is recorded as a “P0” chick.  Once a chick opens its eyes, it starts at “P1” and goes up to “P4,” until it fledges and leaves the nest. When penguin chicks are born, they have fluffy and fuzzy feathers, which are not waterproof.  Chicks must first molt their feathers to allow for new waterproof features so they can go swimming in the ocean for fish to eat. In my mind, and not something scientifically proven, this seems rather like going through puberty as a human. It’s an awkward phase where penguins aren’t sure what’s going on, their parents aren’t coming around as often with food and eventually they stop coming to the nest all together. Feathers start changing in different places until they change all together.

The exception in this comparison is that adult penguins also moult on a yearly basis and during the two week period of moulting they are unable to catch fish and have to eat two weeks worth of food prior to moulting.  The ideal of going through puberty on a yearly basis is not appealing to me personally.

Penguins will often nest near other penguins which can allow for nests to merge or for penguin chicks from two separate nests to hang out with penguins from another nest.  When this happens there is usually still an adult penguin that does some level of supervision with the penguins.  In fact upon finding one of these on Robben Island the single adult penguin seemed very agitated and aggressive towards us.  When penguin chicks congregate together this is called a cachet, pronounced ‘crash’, which is an old french word meaning day nursery.

For the research at Robben Island being able to document and quantify the penguin chick’s age and phase of life is essential to understanding the impacts of environmental factors on chick survival rates.  With the funding of time and money to ongoing sustainable research programs like this we can hope to better understand the impact of environmental factors, including human factors, on the population of South African penguins.  It’s my hope with research and conservation programs like the Robben Island EarthWatch project will allows us to take action and save the penguins rather than end with the extinction of them as a species.

Organizations like SANCCOB help with education, conservation and rehabilitation of seabirds in the Cape Town area. They operate with the intention of helping injured seabirds that are found with medical care to rehabilitate them to release back into the wild.

The photos below are taken from both Robben Island and Boulder’s Beach near Cape Town.  The nests on Robben Island typically have more coverage with the trees and bushes.  The Boulder’s Beach area is mostly sand with some small bushes so their nests are usually less covered.