After watching Happy Feet at WWF’s outdoor movie for Earth Hour 2025, I googled: "Happy Feet amigos penguins". I discovered these are called Adélie penguins: the fast-talking, quick-waddling gang who take care of the main character “Mumble”, an emperor penguin in the Antarctica animation.

I was surprised to read that the entirely black-faced Adélie penguin is, in fact, the most widespread. 

At home in Cape Town, far from Antarctica where most penguins live, I wondered how many people know about our local penguin – the only penguin living on Africa’s mainland. 

Sadly, African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) populations are in shocking decline. To the point that African penguins could be functionally extinct in the wild by 2035 – a mere 10 years away!

If I never knew about the most common Adélie penguin, how can I imagine other people – especially beyond locals and visitors to Cape Town – will know about the African penguin? Let alone know how serious and sensitive their situation is. Once you’ve read the eight insights we’ve collated below, you too will be clued in to their importance, their plight and what we need to do to save the African penguin.

The unique call an African penguin makes is said to sound like a “braying” donkey. This is why it used to be known as a “jackass penguin”.

Often described as wearing a tuxedo, the African penguin is black on its back and flippers, with a white tummy dotted with a few black speckles. It has a single band of black feathers across the breast. Its face is black and white, with a pale pink circle of featherless skin around each eye which is used to regulate its body temperature.

Adélie penguins are considered “Least Concern”. The emperor penguin is “Near Threatened”. In contrast, the African penguin is the only penguin species to be listed as “Critically Endangered”. Each species is classified on the “Red List of Threatened Species” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

In October 2024, the IUCN reclassified African penguins from “Endangered” to “Critically Endangered”. This is when a species faces an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild. 

Populations of this species have declined at an alarming rate of more than 95% from historical abundance. Within a century, numbers have plummeted from over 1 million breeding pairs in the 1920s to approximately 10 400 breeding pairs in 2021.

By 2023, the numbers were shockingly worse: 8 324 breeding pairs across all South African colonies.

The population at Stony Point Nature Reserve in Betty’s Bay has decreased to less than half of what it was three years ago, with only 676 pairs counted in 2024.

If the current population decline continues, the African penguin will be functionally extinct by 2035. This means that there will not be enough breeding pairs for the species to survive.

Multiple threats have been attributed to the African penguins’ shrinking population size, including harvesting of their eggs, habitat loss, predation, avian influenza, climate change and competition with the purse-seine fishery targeting anchovies and sardines. 

African penguins are specialist feeders. This means they eat a specific diet of small pelagic fish, such as sardines and anchovies. Their declining population trend is closely linked to the biomass level of sardine and anchovy. 

Resource competition with the industrial fishing industry is a serious concern for the survival of African penguins considering that they’re flightless and specialist feeders. Most of the rescued African penguins show excessive symptoms of emaciation, evidence of the lack of enough food, especially during the moulting stage when they shed old feathers to grow new ones to remain waterproof and insulated. Before moulting, penguins must eat a lot to store food as fats because the penguins remain on land and go without food for 3-4 weeks during this stage. 

While emperor penguins live in the icy Antarctica, African penguins live on the sandy beaches of Cape Town, as well as various small islands off the coast of South Africa and up to Namibia.

Dassen Island on South Africa’s west coast is home to the biggest colony of African penguins and Bird Island in Algoa Bay, close to Gqeberha, is in the top three by population size.

Around Cape Town, on the mainland, they are found in Simon’s Town on Boulder’s Beach and an hour from Cape Town in the small coastal town of Betty’s Bay at Stony Point Nature Reserve.

In early 2025, BirdLife South Africa and the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Seabirds (SANCCOB) took the South African government to court to implement effective fishing closures around the African penguin colonies to secure enough food for the species with minimal impact on the industrial fishery.

On 18 March 2025, a court order was the result of all parties reaching an agreement on the management of food competition with the small pelagic fishery. This agreement covers the restriction of fishing areas around key breeding colonies of the African penguin. It includes areas of restricted fishing from the west coast (around Dassen Island) to the east coast (Bird Island in Algoa Bay). This also encompasses Robben Island and Stony Point.

The African penguin is an “indicator species” for the health of the wider marine ecosystem. The dwindling numbers of these penguins are a clarifying call for an ecosystem-based management approach to integrate both human needs and ecological resilience. We need positive management interventions that consider trade-offs to effectively protect Africa’s only penguin while maintaining a thriving industrial fishery.

WWF’s work in this space has been to convene conservation and fishery stakeholders towards creating long-lasting commitments to benefit this unique species. We have also invested in the upskilling of youth as marine and coastal community monitors in the Kogelberg region of the Western Cape. Two of these community monitors went on to get jobs as penguin monitors. In the monitoring role, Marcelin Barry and Vathiswa Bafo are funded by WWF but employed by CapeNature at Betty’s Bay Marine Protected Area at Stony Point Nature Reserve.

You may have seen Penguin Town, a 2021 documentary filmed in Simon’s Town during “lockdown” when penguins roamed the suburb’s streets. It won a 2022 Daytime Emmy. Much like Happy Feet, such films help make charismatic penguins seen and loved by millions.

From Mumble’s story about his tap-dancing feet and his search for his “heartsong”, we can now appreciate the phenomenal breeding rituals of emperor penguins as well as food competition with industrial fishing in Antarctica. Though the movie is almost 20 years old, Happy Feet’s inspirational heartsong theme and environmental message are as relevant as ever.

Imagine if African penguins were to be depicted in animated lights, like Mumble and his emperor crew.

As a colleague said to me as we left the outdoor cinema space that Earth Hour night, “Sue, why don’t we reach out to Disney or Triggerfish to make an animation about our African penguins?

Surely, this is worthy of a movie of its own!