African penguins didn’t have a homelessness problem and were happily laying their eggs in burrows dug into centuries-old layers of their excrement until the 1800s when traders discovered that African penguin guano was an excellent fertilizer and shipped it to the United Kingdom.
The guano burrows had provided African penguins with these benefits.
• A constant micro-climate
• High relative humidity
• Buffered temperatures
• Little exposure to the wind
• Shelter from rain and predation
With their nesting sites effectively stolen, penguins were left to nest in the open, making them vulnerable to heatstroke and their chicks and eggs exposed to heat damage and predators.
Luckily, some brilliant people discovered a way to create artificial penguin nests, or penguin penthouses, to protect African penguin families. The nest team spent three months rigorously field-testing 15 different nest prototypes, each equipped with high-precision sensors, determining the microclimate conditions inside the various test nests.
The “winning” nest material is a ceramic-based slurry. The interior volume of the nest matches the measurements of wild guano nests. The nest entrance mimics the entrance hole of the old guano burrows. The new style penguin penthouses were revealed to the penguin populations of Bird Island in the Eastern Cape and Dyer Island in the Western Cape in February 2018.
Continued environmental monitoring proved that the new design met all the environmental requirements, with the ultimate test passed when African penguins successfully bred and raised their chicks in these newly designed penthouses.