If you had walked onto Boulders Beach near Cape Town in 1982, you would have found exactly two penguin pairs and a lot of empty sand. Today, you cannot walk onto that same beach without stepping around thousands of them. According to the study, ‘ Factors influencing growth of the African penguin colony at Boulders, South Africa, 1985–1999 ,’ led by Crawford and colleagues, which tracked the colony from its earliest years through 1999, most of that growth came from adult penguins moving in from other struggling colonies, not simply from chicks hatching on-site. It is less a story of two penguins falling in love with a beach and more about a species running out of options elsewhere and finding one small, protected stretch of coastline that actually worked.
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