Robin's Nest from American Humane - Penguins Return to the Wild: A Heartwarming Journey of Conservation

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

Welcome back to Robin’s Nest, the podcast hosted by Dr. Robin Ganzert, President and CEO of American Humane.As we wrap up season one, we bring you a special story straight from South Africa! In this week’s episode, Dr. Ganzert is joined by five remarkable guests, Dr. David Roberts, Natalie Maskell, Dr. Thomas Edling, Dr. Kashya Choksi, and Cheryl Lesko to discuss an inspiring penguin release. You'll witness the heartwarming moment when 12 African Penguins, many of which were rescued as eggs and rehabilitated by the dedicated team at Sanccob, are returned to the wild. Discover more about the incredible conservation work Sanccob is doing to protect species like the African Penguin!We’re excited for you to join us in this unforgettable episode and deepen your connection to animals around the world!

Welcome to Robin's Nest. So many of us have a deep connection with the animals around us and want to protect them from the pets in our homes to endangered species in the wild. That's why I joined American Humane. As one of the oldest and most effective animal protection groups, we help billions of animals around the world. Join us as we explore how we can build a more humane world together. Hi, I'm Dr. Robin Ganzert, and this is an episode of Robin's Nest. Yes, we are live on the ground here in gorgeous South Africa. We're actually at Stony Point, where we just released, yes, just, 12 precious creatures, African penguins back into the wild. Many of these creatures were raised from chicks

that were rescued, rescued eggs from this great beach at Stony Point. They were rehabilitated at Sankoff, raised, and then today we had the privilege and honor of releasing them back into the wild. There are so many stories in this episode of Robin's Nest. We're thrilled that you're here with us and you get to see some precious creatures. Yes, live in action. Thanks so much for joining us on this episode of Robin's Nest. We will be right back. So I'm Dr. David Roberts.

I'm the clinical vet at SandCob. My job is looking after the penguins that we have in rehabilitation, making sure that they're healthy enough to be released back into the wild. Today we came to Stony Point to release 12 penguins that have been rehabilitated at SANCOB and we're giving them a second chance. We've put them back onto the beach and they've swum away into the ocean and we hope that they will do very well out there. So we released 10 blues, those are the juvenile penguins at the age when they would normally fledge

from the nests and go out into the sea on their own, and two adults. The adults are quite interesting because they were injured penguins that were brought to Sand Cob and required veterinary attention. We treated them in our ICU in our seabed hospital until they were well enough to be released again. And the youngsters were mostly rescued as eggs. So a lot of them come from this colony. They were rescued by our seabird rangers when their parents abandoned them. They were incubated in our penguin incubators, raised in the chick rearing unit and hand raised until they were strong enough to go. They're about 90 days old and they're at that age where you would now let them go into the wild

and normally they would start foraging for themselves. African penguins are an endangered species and we have them as our species that we're most interested in because they are an indicator for the environment. They're a top predator in an environment here in the ocean ecosystem of South Africa and we look after them both because they're charismatic and they draw a lot of attention to the rest of the ecosystem and because they are going extinct. Unfortunately penguin numbers are dropping very quickly and if we don't do

anything to help them or everything we can to help them they could go extinct by 2035 so it's it's an urgent call to do everything we can to look after the species. So it would be a much sadder world if the African penguin went extinct. They play an important role in the ecosystem, they are top predators, they hunt, they recycle nutrients and they move it to other areas. But also the loss of the species shows us that we failed in our role to protect the entire ocean ecosystem.

So we call them an indicator species because it would be very sad news. We know that if they disappear, lots of other species are suffering as well. Personally, I've always wanted to be a conservationist and a vet and this is just one of those opportunities where I can do both. I love working for SandCorp because we work for endangered species, we're doing impactful conservation work and I can do veterinary work. So I can do surgeries, I can run a hospital and put birds back into the wild where they can play a very important put birds back into the wild where they can play a very important role.

I've been inspired by my parents who are both ecologists and inspirational single people making a difference in Africa. There are a lot of inspirational conservationists working with different species throughout the continent and the message they often tell is you can make a difference yourself. If you're not going to do it, maybe nobody will. So it's important to get involved. So we're at Sturte Point Nature Reserve in Bettys Bay. We're very close to Cape Town and it's one of the few African penguin colonies on the

mainland in South Africa. It's also a reserve which is important for the rest of the ecosystem. We've got a marine protected area here as well and it's one of the cornerstone areas that the Cape Nature looks after protecting the indigenous ecosystems of the Western Cape. We have amazing volunteers. A lot of our work at Sandcob is done by volunteers who spend their own personal time looking after penguins and cleaning and our biggest message to them is thank you. Without their help we wouldn't have been able to release these 12 birds today and the hundreds

of others that we release every year. They are the cornerstone of the workforce that help Sankob do what we do. So we released 12 African penguins this morning and they've just swum off into the ocean. Ten of them were chicks and most of those were rescued as eggs, some of them from this colony, when the eggs were abandoned by their parents due to an extreme heat wave. And then the other two adults, they came in with injuries. One of them had a quite a nasty injured eye and we needed to medically treat that so they went through the veterinary and we needed to medically treat that, so they went through the veterinary department's care, they were looked after in our seabird hospital,

and finally they're healthy enough to be reintroduced back into the wild, so they've got a second chance. So we have rangers who work here with Cape Nature that look after the colony. They're our eyes on the ground. They will rescue any bird that's in distress, that needs human intervention, and bring them to us as quickly as possible after they're stabilized so that we can treat them and release them again. So what's very important for any conservation project is education. We need to be able to spread the message and get people

emotionally involved in the work that we do. We've recently built a new center where that's possible. So at SANCorp, at our rehabilitation facility, people can now come to the facility in a comfortable environment, children can watch our home-penned birds and learn more about the ocean ecosystem and in a beautiful environment with a beautiful view of Table Mountain, we hope that it will attract more people to hear our message. I think that there are many avenues that people can learn more about sand cob. They can follow us on social media, we've got accounts in all sorts of different platforms, they can visit our website at www.sandcob.co.za. The African penguins are facing a lot of

different threats, multifactorial influences that are really reducing the numbers of penguins in the wild. We are most worried about the lack of food that's available to them due to commercial unsustainable fishing practices and other factors. The fish populations are very low and if without fish they won't survive and they won't be able to raise their chicks. But there are other factors as well. Global climate change plays an important role in the whole ocean ecosystem, which affects their ability to breed, their ability to raise young and find food. There's disturbance, and that can be everything from people disturbing the breeding colonies to fishing and ship traffic as well. The more the ocean is used by people,

the more disturbance can be a problem. And then pollution plays a very big role as well. And that, we often think about oil spills, they're a big risk to all seabirds, but pollution from pharmaceuticals and wastewater runoff can also affect the ecosystem that they rely on. And finally, as a vet, I'm also very worried about disease. We've had big outbreaks of novel diseases and when a species is suffering,

disease can also play a huge role in reducing their ability to survive well in the wild. Hi, my name is Natalie Maskell and I am the CEO at SANCOB. SANCOB is the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds. And we are a non-profit based in Cape Town, South Africa. And we are working on reversing the decline of seabird species. And we are just here today with the Global Humane, who have generously donated towards SANCOB. And we just want to say a heartfelt thank you for your support. The funds will be used towards our

Sea Bird, our CRU expansion project. This is a project where we incubate eggs and hand rear little chicks and we are expanding the facility to take in four times the amount that we do and also our ranger program will be supported and our eastern cape facility we have a seabird hospital in the eastern cape in port elizabeth as well as in cape town the western cape and the funds will go towards our conservation needs we do all seabirds so we have have bank cormorants, cape cormorants, gulls, heart-lipped gulls, we sometimes even see albatross, we've had flamingos in the past, we see all seabird species. The African penguin is our focus point. We have less than 10,000 breeding pairs left in South

Africa, so that is really where our work needs to focus on over the next 10 years, so that is what we are working on currently. There are so many threats but the main driver is lack of food. The African penguin feeds on anchovy and sardine and around the seabird colonies where they feed there is anchovy and sardine fishing. And because of this fishing there is a competition for the resource and our African penguins are struggling. We're seeing so many come in completely emaciated, no food in their bellies, they are really starving. So we are actually advocating at the moment against the Minister of the Environment and her office to create bigger beneficial closures to fishing for African penguins.

As I said the main driver is the lack of food which is competing with per se in fishing and there's other threats such as predation, there is pollution but the main driver is the lack of food and our aim is to reverse that over the next 10 years otherwise they will be extinct and we will no longer have African penguins in South Africa. We do have cutting edge research that happens at the moment with African penguin species. We also have oiled wildlife response. We have various departments within SANCOB

that all work together to look at every angle of saving the species. I am so inspired by the people that I work with. The team at SANCOB are so passionate. They are there early in the morning, they leave late at night, they give their whole lives to the cause and that is what inspires me. I'm so proud and motivated by them and their passion. This facility has been part of our strategy since 2008 and because SANCOB

is a non-profit organization we needed to raise the funds to be able to build it and we have done so and it is finally built we three weeks out and where we will have a beautiful opening the mayor of cape town will be opening the event for us and here we will be able to offer our own staff volunteers visitors a cup of coffee a slice of cake but more importantly the learners that will come through to sancob will have a space where they can see in real time African penguins and learn about conservation, recycling, the environment and the species. And this is really important in South Africa. A lot of schools and a lot of children are from areas that are vulnerable and they don't get to see an African penguin in real life and they live in Cape Town.

So that is really important for us. We need to change the behavior of children so that we can have a long-term change in the behavior and look after animals. Part of what SANCOB does, we have an education department that goes out to communities as well as brings communities to SANCOB. We do beach cleanups with children and we really do just try and change that next generation. Hey, I'm Tom Edling. I'm the Chief Veterinary Officer in Animal Ethicist for American Humane Global Humane. It's so nice to be here in South Africa representing Global Humane, American Humane, working with SANCOB in their incredible fight to save the endangered African species of penguin. It's really incredible to be here.

You know, I used to work in facilities such like this, working with different types of bird species. I've never worked with penguins before, so it's great to learn from David all the different things that they're doing here and the incredible conservation efforts they have going on. Well, you've worked with incredible animals in your career, and I know you were describing earlier you released raptors. Tell us about that experience. That had to be amazing, too.

Yeah, it's very similar. You know, we would have different people would find raptors and we'd go out and capture them and if they needed a wing fixed or whatever, we'd work on that and get them through rehab. You know, it's a long process just like they have here. Very, very similar. And then you take them out and take them to a nice wild area and release them and watch them fly away. And it just opens your heart. It really does. But raptors are big birds, right? They're big birds, yeah.

I mean, managing that, a wild big bird injured, has risk, right, to veterinarians? Yeah, but it's very manageable. Yeah, most raptor species, they want to get you with their talons, not with their beaks. And so if you just hold onto their feet, you're pretty safe. Oh, well, that's good to know. They might bite you every once in a while, but it's not a big deal.

Well, you look like you've survived all those bites. You look great. So that's wonderful. So you've worked with species, and I know that you've worked with American Humane for a long time. And you now lead our scientific advisory committees across all of our programs, including our conservation program, our zoo and aquarium program, and our work in humane tourism. Tell us a little bit about the secrets to all of this incredible work of bringing together scientists to tell us what it means to be humane. Yeah, well the

secret is finding great people and so I searched the world over literally and find the best people for the for whatever we're trying to accomplish if it's African species we find people who've worked on those or South American whatever the species we find the expert and we bring them in we talk them into getting on to joining our advisory councils and then we take their advice you know the most important thing is to understand what they're trying to tell us and then work it into our programs and so we get the best people from all over the world and they do an You know, the most important thing is to understand what they're trying to tell us and then work it into our programs.

And so we get the best people from all over the world, and they do an incredible job for us. And they volunteer their time. They do, yeah, yeah. It makes my job very easy because they know it all. I just bring them together, and we put together great programs that way. Well, you're very humble because we know that you know an awful lot, and you're, in fact, an animal ethicist. And that's so important for all of our work especially here we talk about the ethics of the environment the interaction with animals tell us about what it means to be an animal ethicist well i try to look at the world through

the eyes of the animals and we humans seem to really think that we're the only species sometimes. And so if we need to truly understand what the animals are going through, we take over the world and we have to remember that we live with millions of other animals in this world and anything we do impacts them. So anytime you're out in the wild and you see a baby animal, leave it alone. Mama's going to be very close. You know, they look cute and cuddly they're not they're baby animals so we need to do everything we can to reduce the impact that we have on animals and let give them a chance to

live you know we we we take over everything and just to think about the ethics of it to try to understand that everything we do impacts the animals. And they're terrified too. You know, most of the animals that you think are cute and cuddly, they're prey species. And we're predators to them. And so anytime you go and pick up a little baby animal, they think we're coming to eat them. They're not understanding that we're there to try to help them.

And it doesn't help them either. You know, when we have to take an animal into a rehab facility, it's going to spend its entire childhood, if you think about it that way, being rehabbed as opposed to being a normal baby animal growing up in the wild. And then getting them back into nature can be very difficult because you have to teach them how to be a wild animal. And that can be an incredible struggle for them. You know, we talk about that in the movie which you participated in, Escape from Extinction

and Rewilding. Right. We talk about that in the movie, which you participated in, Escape from Extinction and Rewilding. We talk about the challenges. It sounds lovely as a marketing headline. Let's rewild and bring a species to live in a certain plot of land that it might have lived successfully 200 years ago. But it's so complex, isn't it? It is. It's very complex because we have all the human interactions. As our population grows, the land that's available for the animals shrinks.

And so we really have to, it's not just putting an animal back somewhere, we have to understand what the implications are of the human interactions, the dogs and cats that are running around, you know, depending on where you are in the world. So it's not just as simple as, okay, go back and live in the wild because it's really true that there's almost no true wild left. Everything is a managed population pretty much anywhere in the world anymore. And so these are all populations that are managed and we have to be very careful in how we interact. Every community has its own endangered species. I live in Arizona, so we have a lot of endangered species that no one thinks about, like the Gila monster.

They walk across my front yard. They're fantastic. We all think of the big glamorous species like in Africa or South America, but they're everywhere. They're in everybody's backyard. So do what you can, find a local species. It doesn't have to be a big, beautiful thing. Every animal is special in its own right. So pick a species and help it.

They all need help. Gushup Chokshi. I'm the senior vice president and chief operating officer They all need help. Gushup Choksi. I'm the Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at American Humane. I have been part of many different conservation movements and organizations. This one is just spectacular. What we've experienced today is actually just one example of our proud and rich legacy, 145 years old, of ensuring the safety and security of animals. You just can't compare this to other experiences because each experience is unique, but I would imagine this is to be number one in my lifetime.

This is just an example of the work we do in conservation as well as in other parts of animal welfare. I always maintain that American Humane is one of America's best-kept secrets, but it's time that we demonstrate to the world who we are, what we do, and why we do it. We are also sort of trying to sort of figure out where, which geographies, which programs, what kind of stakeholders, who would be most conducive and who are aligned with the values and our programs when it comes to animal welfare. Today it's South Africa, tomorrow is the rest of the world. So we always had a history at least for the past seven or eight decades working internationally in fact even more so ever since we had the Restart program when the Secretary of

Defense had invited American Humane to take care of injured war horses in the battlefields of World War I. That has evolved into our rescue program today. However, we think that American Humane, the values and the kinds of programs that have evolved over the decades, has a lot of resonance with other countries, other geographies, and other stakeholders, which would be very meaningful when it comes to the security and safety of animals. We also have plans to go into other parts of another continent beyond just Africa. We have plans to move into the UAE region. We also want to make sure that we have other sectors represented, whether it's the farm sector program and our certification programs, whether it's human Hollywood, it could be

Bollywood, it could be programs in Japan or Korea, depending on where the, again, I come back to the whole issue of values, it comes to animal welfare. This is amazing. This is again one example of the collaborative work that we do in other parts of Africa. We have provided grants, we have provided project funding, and we hope that we continue to do the same in other program areas beyond just penguins. But I think SANCOB and the work they do in research, conservation, and rescue is the kinds of ideals and values that we always want to align with. Hi, I'm Cheryl Lesko, the Senior Vice President and Chief Growth Officer for Global

Humane, the international arm of American Humane. We're so honored to be here today to support this important work of releasing endangered African penguins back to their natural habitat. We hope that you're also moved to support this work globally, and you can do so if you're moved by donating at the QR code on the screen or at www.americanhumane.org. Thank you so much for your support. Gosh, I hope you've enjoyed hearing from Dr. David and Natalie at SANCOB. They are doing amazing and inspiring work, and we're so proud at Global Humane and the Global Humane Conservation Fund of Africa to help fund another group of incredible chicks that we can re-release back into the wild. How special and how precious. We can be part of the solution, be part of the change

to save animal lives. And of course, you've heard from our own at American Humane and Global Humane Dr. Tom Medling, our chief ethicist. He's always amazing and he talks about us being hometown heroes by championing an animal in our own backyard. You don't have to be in South Africa to save an animal life. We can do it from our own backyards and make such a difference. You heard from Kashyap who was talking about our incredible global expansion and the work that we're doing on the ground not only here but in 40 countries and our expansion even in the UAE. And of course you heard from Cheryl Lesko our Chief Growth Officer who's asking us all to be inspired to help support this work in new and amazing and meaningful ways. You know as I

look out around this beautiful cape, as I look at the work that we're going to be doing in the coming days with other megafauna, we're doing work with these beautiful birds, we're doing work all throughout Africa, saving animal lives and making an impact. I hope that you all will continue to listen to episodes of Robin's Nest. Join us, learn something new. Every single episode brings a little bit of heart and hope into your home.

Thanks so much for being part of the Compassion Movement. We hope you'll tune in to the next episode of Robin's Nest.