Penguin Conservation in Patagonia With World Nomads

WhereNext Storytelling Agency produces penguin conservation documentary for World Nomads

If you strike out east from the cabanas and beachfront hotels of Puerto Madryn, Argentina, you soon come to an otherworldly landscape. The windswept desert horizons merge with the deep-blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean as the sun blazes overhead. You can drive for hours and see no people and no cars. There are no trees and precious little shade. This Patagonian coastal desert is a place where you can experience what this planet may have looked like before the arrival of human beings. The vastness and expanse take your breath away, and you feel like the only person on earth.

Follow a dried-up old river canyon as it snakes through the scrub, admiring the beautiful patterns carved in the walls by centuries of biting Patagonian winds, and you eventually come to a lonely, rocky beach on the shores of the Atlantic.

A line of Magellanic Penguins taking a stroll along a Patagonian beach during their breeding season, which lasts from September until late February or March.

As you emerge from the canyon and crunch your way along the beach, your face stung by the salt spray, you find yourself surrounded by hundreds of small birds, looking up at you with a peculiar mixture of curiosity and disdain. Welcome to one of the world's most important colonies of Magellanic Penguins, where World Nomads invited our storytelling agency to produce the short documentary that you can watch above. ‘Penguin Conservation in Patagonia’ tells the story of conservationists and community tourism organizations working hard to protect these vulnerable birds and the oceans that they call home.

Penguins: silly creatures, graceful birds…or both?

Penguins are a species that we like to anthropomorphize; they are a mainstay of animal cartoons and stuffed toys, and their on-land behavior often elicits laughter. As Susan Willis, one of the ecotourists we interviewed for the video, put it: "They're such a silly creature."

Yet for all their inelegance on land, penguins are "so graceful in the water." And it's the water that reveals the real value of a penguin to our planet's ecosystem. Dr. Pablo Garcia Borboroglu, the protagonist of this video, explains how penguins act as excellent indicators of the health of the ocean. Since they swim such long distances in search of food, they require large-scale conservation. Rising and falling penguin populations give us a window onto the health of our oceans and seas. When we act to protect penguins, we are protecting the oceans. And by preserving the oceans, we are protecting our planet and ourselves. Not bad for a comical little fluffball waddling around a Patagonian beach!

Pablo, known as Popi to almost everyone, is a genuinely remarkable conservationist and environmental visionary. He's a marine biologist who was the recipient of the 2018 Gold Award from the Whitley Fund for Nature. This award is so prestigious among conservationists that it has even been dubbed the 'green Oscar.' He's also a National Geographic Explorer and won the 2018 Buffett Award for Leadership in Conservation.

Pablo Garcia Borboroglu, or Popi, sitting among the colony of penguins that he has helped to save. He fell in love with penguins on his first visit to a colony and has dedicated his life to protecting penguin species.

The Global Penguin Society

Magellanic Penguin (Photo: Global Penguin Society)

Popi founded the Global Penguin Society, "an internationally recognized leader organization dedicated to the conservation of the world's penguin species, the coasts and the oceans they inhabit." He first learned about penguins from his grandmother, who used to travel to the beaches of Patagonia by horse-and-cart to visit their then vast breeding colonies. After his first visit to one of those colonies, surrounded by the chaos of a penguin colony half-a-million strong, he knew that his life's mission was to protect penguins. The seeds were sown for the creation of The Global Penguin Society.

We meet Popi as he conducts his scientific studies of the colony. First, he selects a penguin. After coaxing an understandably reluctant male out into the open and gently grabbing hold of it, he delicately straps a band around its chest and checks its weight. The penguin dangles forlornly from the strap, swaying gently in the breeze. He weighs in at 5 kg, a happy and healthy individual. After being fitted with a shiny new stainless steel band, he haughtily waddles back to the shade and shelter of a scrubby bush, giving Popi the side-eye as he continues along the beach to find another penguin. But that short moment of inconvenience for the penguin will provide invaluable scientific information. Popi will know whether that individual returns to the same nest, how many chicks it will have in the future, and how far it travels to fishing grounds outside the breeding season.

The Global Penguin Society's achievements in this colony have been remarkable. In the 1980s, 40,000 penguins were dying annually in Chubut Province. Contamination from local fishermen and outside visitors who brought pets that killed chicks was causing this colony to shrink every year. There seemed to be little hope for the penguins of Puerto Madryn.

Dr. Pablo Garcia Borboroglu (R) recording the weight of a Magellanic Penguin as part of his work with The Global Penguin Society in Argentina

At first, Popi failed to convince the local people to change their ways. As is often the case in conservation, he crashed headfirst into the barriers of local tradition and mistrust of outsiders. But then he discovered the key to protecting the penguins: ecotourism.

El Pedral: the Ocean-going House in the Desert

At this point in the video, we meet Silvina Garzonio, the owner of Hotel El Pedral. This surreal little 1920s house, complete with a delightful gothic turret, literally traveled across the ocean to get to its current location on a desert bluff in Chubut. It was built in Europe, taken apart piece by piece, and rebuilt in the vast Patagonian landscape. It's seen an awful lot for a house and seems to have a soul of its own. Yet now, a century after it was first built, it hosts parties of ecotourists and is playing a vital role in the conservation of this unique landscape. Bus drivers, chefs, waiters, tour guides: many local people now make a living from this one operation. And the driving force of that operation: those funny little penguins on the beach below the hotel. Little do they know it, but the penguins are helping to protect themselves. They're generating jobs, local people are happy, and the penguins remain undisturbed.

The surreal Hotel El Pedral: a 1920s European house marooned in the deserts of Patagonia

As El Pedral's hostess Maite Gonzalez Lloyd (whose surname highlights the large Welsh community living in Chubut) points out in the video, this hotel isn't for everyone. It takes a particular type of person to appreciate the emptiness, the wide-open spaces, and the lack of people that characterize Patagonia. But special places attract special people, and the travelers who visit El Pedral and the penguins play an essential part in protecting these lands so that future generations can enjoy them.

World Nomads and The Global Penguin Society Partnership

Since Popi and The Global Penguin Society arrived on the scene, this colony has grown from just six pairs to 70, then 190, and now almost 1,800. It's a change that Popi never believed he would witness in his lifetime; he expected it to take hundreds of years. But, as the old Greek proverb goes, "a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." Popi never expected to sit in the shade of the tree he planted, but his dedication to penguins has brought unexpectedly quick and positive results.

World Nomads supports the society both financially and by bringing tourists to experience the penguin colony. It was a privilege for our storytelling agency to work with them to draw attention to the work being done by Pablo Garcia Borboroglu to protect vulnerable species and offer economic alternatives to local people at the same time.

The video we produced is a tribute to a conservation hero. It's also a postcard from a unique corner of the planet, where enormous skies fade indivisibly into the ocean, where a warm desert breeze kicks up the sandy earth, and where a small colony of penguins on the beach inspired a global movement to protect their species.

The Magellanic Penguin is listed as ‘Near Threatened’ by IUCN, but the population of the El Pedral colony has bounced back impressively thanks to coordinated conservation efforts and ecotourism.

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