Make an Egg-cellent choice!
Why bother with chocolate eggs when for R300 you can ‘adopt’ a genuine African penguin egg – rescued from an abandoned nest and placed in an incubator in our specialised Chick Rearing Unit?
Sometime during the next 30 days or so, ‘your’ egg will hatch – and a fluffy penguin chick will emerge into the world. Not the world of sand and sea and parents’ soft warm feathers … but a world of carefully controlled temperature and gentle human hands.
This will be ‘home’ for the next three months, while your chick grows from a helpless fluffy bundle into a strong young penguin, able to swim and hunt for fish. And then it will be released back into an established wild penguin colony under the watchful eye of trained colony managers.
With fewer than 23 000 breeding pairs left in the wild, we need to ensure that every viable African penguin egg hatches. The survival of this highly endangered species depends on it.
But incubating, hatching and successfully hand-rearing an African penguin chick costs money.
And that’s why we hope you will ‘adopt’ one of these eggs now, by making a donation of R300. Your contribution will help pay for fish, veterinary care and other essential items that are needed to hatch an egg and raise a chick.
In return, you’ll receive a Certificate of Adoption and two O-FISH-ALLY awesome SANCCOB screensavers. More importantly, you’ll be part of SANCCOB’s vital programme to reverse the decline of the endangered African penguin.
Over the years, we’ve successfully hand-reared and released nearly 5 000 penguin chicks into the wild. And research shows that their unconventional upbringing has no effect on the birds’ subsequent behaviour. They swim, hunt for food, mate and rear their own young – just like naturally-reared birds.
But we can’t do it alone. So please will you ‘adopt’ a penguin egg right now? You’ll help save a chick’s life – and give it a chance to play its role in the conservation of the species. Thank you!