A Court Win, a Census Bump and a Dead Sardine Run: South Africa's Penguin Year
The African Penguin has lost around 97% of its historical population, breeds nowhere on earth but southern Africa, and on current trends is projected to vanish from the wild around 2035. Against that backdrop, 2025 and 2026 produced a strange sequence of news: a landmark court order, a census increase at the world's most visited penguin colony, and a mass die-off of the fish the birds depend on. All three belong to the same story.
The number that matters
Historically there were perhaps as many as a million breeding pairs. A global survey concluded in December puts the South African share at 8,750 pairs — the first time the species has fallen below 10,000. South Africa holds about 88% of the world's colonies, and the species is listed as Critically Endangered.
African Penguins are specialists. They eat sardine and anchovy, which is also what South Africa's purse-seine fishery targets — the same fish, on the same coast, in the same season. Food shortages close to the breeding islands have been linked directly to chick survival, and that is the chain the last two years of policy has been trying to break.
What the court changed
On 18 March 2025 the High Court formalised a settlement between BirdLife South Africa and SANCCOB on one side and the small-pelagic fishing industry on the other. Purse-seine fishing is now barred within 20 km of Robben Island and Bird Island in Algoa Bay, with narrower closures around Dassen Island, Stony Point, Dyer Island and St Croix. The zones run for ten years, with a scientific review after six.
The settlement followed thirteen years of the government's own Island Closure Experiment (2008–2021) and an international expert panel appointed in late 2022. The panel's central point was procedural and is easy to miss: what matters is not the size of a closed area but whether it sits over the water the birds actually use.
Where the birds actually go
Research published in February 2026 by penguin scientists from the University of St Andrews, the University of Exeter, the national Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment and BirdLife South Africa set out to test exactly that. Instead of measuring how much fish the fishery removes, they overlapped two sets of tracking data: where penguins forage, and where fishing vessels work. The result was encouraging. The new Robben Island closure protects a key foraging area north-east of the colony — previously the single highest-overlap zone between penguins and boats.
It also showed why closures have to be drawn colony by colony. Foraging ranges differ from island to island, so a uniform radius around every colony protects the right water at some sites and the wrong water at others.
And then the sardines died
From August 2026, sardines began washing up dead in large numbers in the Western Cape and around Gqeberha. Pilchard herpesvirus was confirmed in the affected fish and is considered the most likely primary cause. In response the department capped sardine catches at 25% of permit-holders' outstanding 2026 quota until 2 October, while hydroacoustic surveys attempt to establish how much of the stock is left.
The timing is what worries conservationists. Penguins must build up fat reserves before the annual moult, when they are stuck ashore for weeks and cannot feed at sea at all — a die-off in the weeks before that window lands on the worst possible date. In Algoa Bay, Nelson Mandela Bay had more than 7,000 breeding pairs about a decade ago; the figure is now around 700. WWF South Africa has called for the sardine fishery to be closed entirely until the surviving stock is measured. The industry association supports the precautionary cap but wants the surveys run promptly, because the results will also set the 2027 quota. The department's position is that the evidence does not yet justify a full closure.
The one number going the right way
Then there is Boulders, near Simon's Town, where the 2026 colony census recorded 790 breeding pairs, up from 698 — an increase of 92 pairs and roughly 2,528 penguins. Boulders is one of the species' most important sites and the only place most people will ever meet an African Penguin; the gain comes out of a partnership between South African National Parks, SANCCOB, the City of Cape Town, Nature Connect, researchers and volunteers.
It is a real result, and it is a local one. A colony that is fed by tourism revenue and guarded by fencing can grow while the population as a whole keeps sliding, because the causes of the slide are at sea.
What to watch
Three things. First, compliance: the 20 km zones are as good as the enforcement behind them, and the six-year review is a long way off. Second, the sardine survey — if the stock is as bad as the die-off suggests, the 2027 quota fight will be harder than the 2025 court case. Third, and most important, whether a rangewide uptick ever shows up in a January count. Penguins are counted on land but limited by the ocean, which means the monitoring happens in the wrong place to catch trouble early. Closures and quotas are the only levers that act before the counters arrive.
Listening to a penguin coast
Penguins are not silent birds — they bray, bark and bellow at each other across a colony, and their calls carry for hundreds of metres over the surf. Our archive does not hold a single African Penguin recording, which is itself an illustration of the shortage covered in our piece on Africa's missing sound data. What we do host from South Africa is the voice of the coastal scrub behind the colonies.