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Hundreds of abandoned Cape Cormorant babies poke their tiny beaks through the side of a cardboard box, eagerly awaiting food at a seabird rescue center in the coastal city of Cape Town in South Africa.
Neck slender and still covered in baby fluff, the gray-spotted chicks were found starving on rocky outcrops on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned during apartheid, after their parents rejected them last month.
Around 2,000 were shipped to the continent by boat and taken to the Coastal Bird Conservation Foundation of Southern Africa (SANCOBB), where the rescue of these endangered animals was a delicate operation.
More than 800 succumbed to weakness and dehydration during the trip and soon after arriving, despite desperate efforts to keep them alive.
But the others have recovered and are now devouring more than a ton of sardines per week.
“They certainly eat us out of the house and out of the house,” says Nicky Stander, SANCOBB Intervention Manager.
Volunteers regularly weigh cormorants while they are being treated. By RODGER BOSCH (AFP) Between 30 and 50 volunteers come each day to feed, weigh and clean the orphan chicks.
Dressed in green plastic overalls, they gently slide tubes into the cormorant’s beaks and send liquid into their stomachs.
“If they’re not swimming, they have to be hydrated manually,” says Stander. “It takes a lot of work … because of the numbers we have.”
The youngest chicks are wrapped in soft towels and kept in separate baby pens at the nursery.
Not yet old enough to eat on their own, they are delicately hand-fed small pieces of sardine and hydrated with a syringe.
Swimming lessons
Older cormorants are kept in a larger enclosure where there is space to start stretching their wings and swimming.
As the volunteers enter with glistening platters of sardines, the birds eagerly raise their heads, revealing a lighter patch of feathers under their beaks.
The chicks were fragile when they arrived and weighed only 300 to 600 grams (11 to 21 ounces).
The smallest of the rescued chicks should be wrapped in towels. By RODGER BOSCH (AFP) As they grow into healthy adults, they should reach around one kilogram.
Before they come out, “we have to wait for them to grow their plumage feathers so that they can then become waterproof,” says Stander.
“Then it’s about making sure that we (swim) them in the pools.”
While the strongest birds are almost ready to go, the nursery chicks will still have to wait until the end of the month.
SANCOBB, South Africa’s largest seabird rescue service, typically treats around 2,000 animals per year at its dedicated hospital.
Capacity was overwhelmed by the arrival of cormorants, and tourist viewing decks were temporarily turned into food production sites to cope with it.
Shelter workers are bewildered by the massive grounding and fear it signals the start of a worrying trend.
Scientists believe the parents may have abandoned the chicks for lack of food due to human overfishing. By RODGER BOSCH (AFP) “Initially, we thought the birds had been abandoned because of the high summer heat,” says Stander.
“But after consulting with other scientists, we now believe that a lack of food is the likely cause.”
Stander warns that this is a “red flag” for the impacts of overfishing in the region.
Without sufficient food, she says cormorants will likely continue to abandon their chicks or even stop breeding altogether.
“We have seen emaciated birds entering the center for years,” she notes. “What we are afraid of is that this will happen more and more in the future.”
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