Decoy tactics: can fake concrete penguins help save the real thing?

With numbers plummeting and food hard to find, African penguins face a bleak future - but a novel conservation plan is under way

It's amazing to see wild creatures in their natural homes," says Gaja Rojec, as she sits next to a group of African penguins that don't seem at all bothered by her presence. It is late January 2020, and the Slovenian film-maker is just one of about 800,000 people who have visited Boulders Beach on South Africa's Cape Peninsula every year to get up close to these charismatic flightless birds.

At Boulders, just over an hour's drive south of central Cape Town, African penguins swim, loaf around and breed within a few metres of visitors, who can even get into the water with them. Penguins normally nest on offshore islands, but this small beach is surrounded by houses which form a barrier to land-based predators such as caracal lynxes and baboons, making it a "pseudo island" where the birds feel safe. They have bred here since the early 1980s, and it's now part of the Table Mountain national park.