As African penguin population dwindles, researchers plan new colony
WENDELL ROELF SOUTH African researchers plan to release scores of abandoned, hand-reared African penguin chicks at the Western Cape's De Hoop nature reserve, boosting efforts to start a new breeding colony of the seabirds at risk of extinction. The only penguin that breeds in Africa, it was once South Africa's most abundant seabird. But the population plunged to around 13,000 breeding pairs last year, from more than 1 million pairs in the 1920s, when their eggs started to be harvested for human consumption, government data shows. Researchers have since January 2019 deployed dummy penguins that emit the distinctive call of…