Caring for Cape Town's cormorants

This bird sanctuary in Cape Town, South Africa, is taking care of baby cormorant birds. The birds were left alone by their parents.

The cormorants were discovered on rocks near an island. Around 2,000 birds were taken back to the mainland so that the bird sanctuary could look after them. But more than 800 cormorants died.

The rest of the birds are getting better and they eat more than a tonne of fish every week.

These cormorants are too young to eat on their own. Around 50 volunteers come to the sanctuary to feed the birds by hand.

Older cormorants are kept in this space, where they are starting to swim. The sanctuary will release these birds soon.

Nicky Stander is the manager of the sanctuary.

Nicky Stander: "We will probably start looking at releasing the bigger birds in the next three weeks hopefully and the smaller birds will obviously be here in the next two to three months."

Scientists think the baby birds were left because there wasn't much food. Nicky Stander worries that if this situation continues, cormorants could become extinct.

Nicky Stander: "What we're scared of is this is going to happen more and more in the future. If, if they're not having, if they're not finding their fish in the wild, what's going to happen? They're going to either stop breeding or if they do breed, they're going to just abandon if they're not finding enough food. And what's the knock-on effect of that is that the population continues to decline until they become extinct."

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