Caring for traumatised penguins is a pretty thankless task — yet volunteers are queueing up to help the birds survive the Apollo Sea oil disaster in the Cape. Justin Pearce joined in
THE plaster on the man’s forehead said it all. Feed a penguin, clean a penguin, nurture a penguin, and it doesn’t thank you. It tears a chunk out of your face, and the only thing to be happy about is that it missed your eye by three centimetres.
There are people who enjoy helping animals because nothing matches the satisfaction to be gained from knowing that a favourite beastie is silently grateful for one’s effort. For such people, bliss involves having a well-fed puppy snoozing at one’s feet, larks recently released from their cages singing merrily about one’s head, and lambs narrowly saved from the slaughter gambolling in a nearby meadow.
People who look after sea birds do not fall into this category. In the great theatre of love and affection, a penguin is not an appreciative audience. Yet every time a fresh oil slick hits the Cape coast, the penguin cleaners and feeders queue up at the Sanccob (South African National Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds) sanctuary in Table View. This year, after the biggest oil spill ever, the Sanccob management had to plead with newcomers and voyeurs to step aside so as not to get in the way of the experienced scrubbers.
And the experienced scrubbers came back for more, bandages and all. One ex-Capetonian who was in town to visit her family elected to spend days of her holiday forcing icy fish down the throats of gannets. A Pretoria vet and her husband travelled 1 500km for no other purpose than to do their bit for the penguins. During the course of Saturday morning a police van arrived at the sanctuary, and two officers solemnly marched inside with a wooden box containing a dirty penguin.
A coating of crude oil hinders the sea birds’ movement so severely that it is impossible for them to catch fish. So they need to be washed, a task reserved for the virtuosi of bird care who line up, one person one penguin, at a row of steel barrels.
It’s a precisely orchestrated operation, detailed in an entire typed page of instructions that are displayed to make sure you have your various detergents ready before you start, and to remind you to change the water half way through.
Washing the birds strips them of their natural waterproofing, so they are held at the sanctuary for about three weeks, until their plumage has regained its oiliness. Left to their own devices, penguins don’t touch dead fish, hence the labour-intensive ritual of pushing pilchards as far down the bird’s throat as possible.
“The birds are usually deeply traumatised,” one Sanccob staff member pointed out. Understandably so. And they seem to have discovered primal scream therapy as a way of dealing with the trauma every time they come into contact with a human being.
Before you feed a penguin, you have to catch it. Approach your penguin quietly so as not to traumatise it too much, and take it gently by the wingtip with your right hand.
There’s a logic to this — the penguin’s beak can’t reach over there so it can’t bite you. Then you gently grip the back of the bird’s neck with your left hand, then slide your right hand under its belly. You find yourself with a handful of writhing, snapping bird that wants to be anywhere except in your hands. You hold it well away from your face.
The more docile birds resign themselves to their fate and calm down fairly quickly. The more overtly traumatised ones require a straitjacket grip between your knees as you attempt to insert the fish into a beak that could cut sheet metal. A co-operative bird will swallow a pilchard whole. An unco-operative bird will slice it, leaving you holding a bloody half- fish.
Over in the “sick bay” reserved for infected penguins, an intense- looking staff member was supervising two children who were inserting antibiotics and cod-liver oil tablets into more dead pilchards.
She was wide-eyed in her admiration for the penguins’ ability to deal with their own trauma: “Considering they’ve been taken off the island, away from their chicks — and I don’t know if this is true for penguins, but some birds mate for life — they’re doing pretty well.”
The man with the plaster on his forehead wasn’t doing too badly either. Considering.