Previously called Jackass penguins because their raucous cry resembles the sound of a tortured donkey, these flightless birds have not always had a good relationship with people — and they've almost invariably come off second best.

Ever since the first European ship sailed its tentative course around the Cape to the fabled spice islands of the East, penguins and penguin eggs have been sought-after additions to the decidedly unimaginative menu of inadequately fed seamen — and they didn't have to work hard for their supper.

Like their less fortunate cousins, the flightless dodos that were hunted to extinction on Mauritius in probably the mid-17th Century, penguins were easy prey. But unlike the dodos that really were sitting ducks wondering aimlessly around the beaches nibbling on fruit, lazing in the sun, and waddling trustingly up to predatory humans, penguins can swim.

And it is probably this — and the fact that they have a healthy natural distrust of all other life forms — that saved them from the fate of the dodo.

While the penguin colonies were initially plundered solely for their eggs and meat by hungry sailors, it wasn't long before European industrialists realised the immense value of guano — bird droppings. Before the age of synthetic chemical production, guano was the principle ingredient of the fertilisers essential to the expanding agricultural economies of Europe and the Americas.

And don't let the word 'droppings' fool you. Penguins had been roosting on offshore islands for years and years and years, so we're not talking about a few little blobs here and there. The accumulation of guano was enormous. On Ichaboe Island, off the coast of Namibia, it was estimated to be about 27m thick!

The guano rush

That was before the guano rush — a surge of maritime fortune hunters more ruthless, tougher, and infinitely more smelly than any badlands diamond or gold prospector in 19th-century Kimberley, Johannesburg, California or the Klondike.

At the peak of the rush between 1843 and 1845 there were up to 460 boats anchored off the tiny island, heaving around and dragging their anchors in the wild and exposed Atlantic Ocean. Every day about 6000 rough, bearded men fought each other for the best digging sites, swinging shovels and picks at anything that got in their way.

It would seem that penguins could quite happily do without their waste, but all that guano has a purpose — it's where the birds make their nests. They dig deep into the soft, yielding guano to form cosy burrows sheltered from the boiling sun, and incubate their two eggs, of which only one usually survives.

Penguins mate for life, so these are not temporary digs: monogamous pairs usually return to the same burrows year after year. So the destruction of the guano was the destruction of the penguins' homes. Not to mention the simultaneous robbing of nests and wholesale slaughter of adult and juvenile birds to feed the rapacious mob of miners.

The guano rush didn't last long, but it was enough to destroy the once-perfect habitats of Ichaboe, the nearby Neglectus Islet, and almost every other island breeding site of any significance.

New threats

That was the 19th century, but for most of the 20th century African penguins faced entirely different threats. Declining fish stocks due to over-fishing made it increasingly difficult for the birds to find food.

Penguins are spectacularly good swimmers. Using their flippers — which in other birds would be called wings — they glide through the water easily maintaining an average speed of about 7km/h for up to 100 kilometres in a single fishing trip. They regularly dive to depths of about 30m in search of prey, but can go to over 100m if they need to. And with a little shot of adrenaline courtesy of a hungry shark or seal, or a rapidly escaping anchovy, they can reach speeds of anything between 20km to 25km an hour.

With competition from commercial fishing vessels, penguins have to work much harder for every fish. And if that wasn't bad enough, the 20th century had something far more deadly to throw at the beleaguered little birds — oil.

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