The oil from the wreck of the ore carrier "Treasure" posed a severe threat to the Pengin colonies of Dassen and Robben Islands, and a massive volunteer effort swung into action to remove both oiled and unoiled penguins from the islands, and to clean and rehabilitate the oiled penguins.
I became a small part of this by volunteering to help catch penguins on Robben Island. Here are a few pics taken during this operation...
Badly oiled penguin, waiting to be caught and cleaned... :) Photo: L.G. Underhill
The Treasure, shortly before sinking. Photo: Cape Times
The first stage was herding the groups back up the beach to where they could be caught. The splash is from one penguin trying to break through the portable net "fence".
Further up the beach, the "fence" is closed... this is a slow, patient process to avoid panicking the birds, and to keep them in a group..
The penguins are then caught and boxed- 4 to a box, and the oiled and unoiled ones separated, and their boxes labelled...
The catching and boxing process was quickly and efficiently done... then the boxes were loaded onto trucks (more volunteers) and finally shipped by ferry to the mainland...
Yours truly with some of the badly oiled birds... (they are slower and easier to catch than the unoiled ones)... Part of the operation also involved catching individual birds from the rocks, where they couldn't be netted- that was tricky- and we got pretty wet in the process!
The operation was a huge success, thanks to an unprecedented public participation process... and clean healthy penguins were rehabilitated into the environment after the sunken tanker had been drained of its oil...
These 2 pics were "skollied" off the internet
