African penguins | Miles To The Wild

The African Penguin (Spheniscus demersus), also known as the jackass penguin and black-footed penguin is a species of penguin, confined to southern African waters. It is also widely known as the “jackass” penguin for its donkey-like bray, although several related species of South American penguins produce the same sound. Like all extant penguins it is flightless, with a streamlined body, and wings stiffened and flattened into flippers for a marine habitat.

African Penguins are found in the coastal areas of southern Africa. They are easily seen at Boulders Beach, about an hour’s drive south of Cape Town.

Af Peng

LEARN MORE ABOUT AFRICAN PENGUINS

VIDEOS

This is a fantastic video which depicts just about every activity in an African Penguin’s life (and I do mean EVERYTHING)!

And here’s some information about conserving them.

You can do this either as a guided tour or on your own in a rental car. Driving is easy around South Africa once you get away from the cities and we chose this option to have more control on where we went and how long we stayed there.

The distance isn’t that far, you will have around 3-ish hours of driving time plus what time you spend along the way. We stopped at Boulder Beach to see the Africa Penguins, then took the scenic drive out to the Cape of Good Hope and stopped at World of Birds on the way back.

Cape Good Hope

So we got up early and headed to Boulders Beach in hopes of beating the tour groups. We did pretty well, had nice close views of the African Penguins!

We headed south towards the Cape of Good Hope. This is where we ran into the tourist crowds again. It was especially funny to see the baboons jumping on some of the cars. There are signs everywhere telling people not to feed the baboons (we didn’t) but apparently some people did.