Fake it till they make it: the creation of a concrete penguin colony

The end of 2018 saw the start of tangible work on an exciting conservation initiative by BirdLife South Africa. This project, initiated in 2010, will attempt to spawn a new African Penguin colony at De Hoop Nature Reserve in the Overberg region of the Western Cape. The initiative will use ‘passive social attraction’ techniques, one of which is the use of decoys to attract passing penguins and persuade them that a colony already exists. In this article, sculptor Roelf Daling reveals how he made some convincing decoys for the project.