Those tired of buying chocolate eggs and bunnies can this year’s Catholic Easter in South Africa to adopt a real egg, from which a real penguin will hatch.

However these eggs it is not something one takes home.

Since the beginning of the year, a South African environmental organization has been incubating more than 200 African penguin eggs, which it had previously rescued from two colonies of the endangered species.

The South African Foundation for the Conservation of Shorebirds (SANCCOB) is appealing for donations to help cover the costs of hatching them, inviting people to ‘adopt an egg’.

The African penguin—the only penguin species that breeds in Africa and is also found in Namibia—was once the most populous seabird in southern Africa.

Not anymore. Its population is down to fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs in 2024, according to SANCCOB’s director of resources Ronis Daniels, meaning only 1% of the 1 million that existed a century ago remain.

“If the current course continues, which is a loss of 8% every year, we predict extinction by 2035,” he told Reuters. “There won’t be enough to save the population living free in the wild.”

African penguins face many threats, but the main one is commercial fishing, which destroys the sardine and anchovy stocks they depend on for survival.

“This has to be at the top of the list,” Daniels noted. “The sad thing is that these fish are mainly exported for fishmeal.”

Among the other threats are pollution and noise pollution from shipping routes around South Africa, especially when ships stop to refuel in Algoa Bay, he noted.

“At a time when everyone’s thinking about chocolate and cuddly bunnies, we’d like you to adopt a penguin egg,” volunteer Nikki Sandbolt said as she walked past a fenced-in area where baby penguins are being raised.

“It’s really very expensive for us to raise these baby penguins from egg to maturity,” he added, explaining that it takes four months before they can release the hatched penguins into the wild.