"You look at the penguins and think they have a lovely time in sunny South Africa, but it's a struggle," said Monique Ruthenberg, a ranger with the Table Mountain National Park in Cape Town, where summer temperatures recently hit 104 degress.
Park authorities installed the boxes - made of a fiberglass mix, shaped like a burrow, and dug into the sand to mimic the real nests - at Boulders Beach as part of desperate efforts to protect the dwindling populations of African penguins.
It has been a losing struggle. Numbers of the curious creatures have plummeted from about 3 million in the 1930s to 120,000 because of overfishing and pollution. Some specialists fear the species will die out in as little as a decade, and are particularly alarmed at the prospect of global warming increasing the number of scorching days, raising water temperatures and altering fish migration patterns.
The Boulders Beach colony has fallen 30 percent from a peak of 3,900 birds in 2005 to 2,600 and some of the island colonies have suffered calamitous declines of 50 percent.
The African penguin, also called the jackass because of its bray, is the only one to inhabit the continent. It has shorter feathers than the Antarctic birds because it doesn't face such cold and is just 20 inches tall.
The Boulders Colony began in 1985 when a couple of penguins moved from a nearby island onto the beach in the naval base of Simon's Town, decided they liked it, and stayed.
So many followed that authorities had to build fences to prevent them from invading people's gardens. But the tourists poured in.
About 600,000 a year now visit Boulders Beach, which boasts that it is the only place in the world where people can swim with penguins.
The real life "Happy Feet" are unfazed by all the attention and, apart from a few who were killed while snoozing under visitors' cars, don't seem to have suffered from their contact with humans.
