Comm: "The drama began when the Panama registered ship, The Treasure, carrying 1300 tons of crude oil asked to be allowed into Cape Town harbour in South Africa. When it arrived maritime safety authorities noticed a large tear in its hull. Fearing it might sink in the harbour they had it towed out to sea. These are the last pictures of The Treasure.

"Soon afterwards the tow connection parted and The Treasure sank 6 kilometres off the coast. Oil started leaking immediately. The very next day penguins covered in the stuff came ashore on Robben Island, 20 kilometres to the South.

"There were all the hallmarks of an impending ecological catastrophe. Could anything be done to save them?

"The chief victim of this oil spill would turn out to be the African penguin. This Southern African sea bird has been classified a vulnerable species as it is fast approaching endangered status. More than 40,000 of the total world population of 160,000 African penguins face death from the oil spilling from the tanker. The thick black oil polluted this historic island, Robben Island, home to the third biggest colony of African penguins and only recently declared a World Heritage Site.

"In this Earth Report we tell the story of a remarkable rescue operation off the coast of South Africa.

"To save these birds would be a mammoth task. They would have to be captured, taken to the mainland and treated. Thousands of them.

"Unoiled birds would have to be removed as a preventative."

Pail Britton: "At the moment there's in excess of 2000 which is beyond our capacity. We're busy setting up a satellite station in a warehouse in Salt River and so birds - some of the birds will go there."

Comm: "Since the last major oil spill to pollute this part of the South African coast the conservation agencies have learnt how to capture and care for oiled birds. A major improvement is the specially designed boxes for transporting captured penguins. During previous spills most mortalities occurred during transportation.

"The portable net also proved very effective. But the real task begins when the oiled birds arrive at the SANCCOB Centre at Reepfly near Cape Town.

"Before the birds are washed they are given emergency medical treatment. Every individual bird is assessed and documented."

Sam Petersen: "What we do next is to assess his hydration so in that we just have a look at the skin elasticity in his neck. Can you see how it's falling back down again, that's normal.

"OK? So I'm quite happy that he hasn't become dehydrated. OK so the next thing we need to do is to give him some rehydration fluids. This erm this contained glucose and electrolytes for giving him some energy. Ok, this tube gets passed all the way down into his stomach. Alright? I leave the tube there and give him some activated charcoal. The activated charcoal erm binds the toxins in their stomach and at the same time this particular product has kaolin in it which lines the stomach as one of the problems with oil is that it's very ulcerative so it causes ulceration of the gastrointestinal tract. So to prevent that gastro-anaemia and any anaemia that they're suffering from or any we we give them an iron injection.

"OK so each bird gets their own individual record. Erm so we've got erm a juvenile, his weight for 2.5kgs.

"OK? Oiled. Yes or no, he's oiled. Percentage of his oiling?"

Male rescuer: "About 50%."

Sam Petersen: "50%"

Comm: "Washing the oil off is the critical part of the rehabilitation process. Oil destroys a bird's waterproofing by causing it's feathers to clump together. This leads to hypothermia in cold sea water. An oiled bird will not hunt but mobilise its fat resources and eventually dehydrate and die."

Sam Petersen: "OK so it's very important that you always work with 2 people. The one person is your-your handler and they-they're holding the bird firmly all the time. For the bird's safety and for the washer's safety because the bird will bite the washer.

"When we use a toothbrush erm to clean the more delicates areas working around the head and around the eyes making sure that the soap and the detergents don't get ingested by the birds or onto their eyes."

Comm: "The detergent needs to be rinsed off properly for the birds to regain their waterproofing."

Sam Petersen: "If you look really closely you can actually start to see the down becoming dry.

"You can see over here, can you see this is actually dry even though the water is splashing on it. It's actually staying dry so the birds need to be rinsed until water can run on them and they stay dry.

"These little guys have made such a mark on my life. The first few nights I don't think there was a dry eye here, you know? Even now. They're gorgeous. They've got the most incredible little personalities, you know them, all the way through the - through the system, you can pick out their little personalities. It's really beautiful."

Comm: "Penguins mainly eat sardines and anchovies. They feed underwater so out of the water they have to be force fed, but they learn quickly.

"As the number of oiled penguins grows daily the conservation community and the broader public of Cape Town starts to mobilise."

Mohammed Valli Moosa: "I must say that I was touched to see this large number of volunteers working around the clock who mobilised themselves and went into action literally overnight.

"I think it says a great deal about the concerns that this society has erm for conservation and for-for the preservation of our sensitive ecological areas."

Dr. Ian Macdonald: "The volunteers, as you can see behind, they are the backbone of this operation. We would never be able to pay for this erm operation if it all had to be on paid staff."

Estelle van der Merwe: "We have some penguins at SANCCOB now than we had during the Apollo Sea and we're going up. We must have, by now, about 15,000 plus at erm Salt River so we've got vast numbers of penguins. It is going to be the biggest rescue operation ever.

"Our biggest problem is going to be to have enough manpower to keep doing this. We're planning to wash about 500 a day. We're looking at this point at having at least 20,000 penguins in to wash. It takes a minimum of 20 - 20 minutes. We're doing quick washes now, 20 minutes to half an hour to wash a penguin. Anyone can work that out. It's going to take us a long time. We know from past experience your sick weaker penguins will be more heavily oiled so take longer to get out so I can see us being very busy for the next 3 or 4 months."

Sara Scarth: "Responding to oil spill has become one of our specialisations unfortunately. Erm we have an international wildlife - oiled wildlife response team and that team is made up of the world's leading oiled wildlife rehabilitators and what IFAW has done is brought those specialists together under our banner and we've made it possible for those people to be able to erm fly to the scene of a big spill like the one you have here and be able to work and co-operate with the local agency, in this case SANCCOB and help them cope with the disaster."

Comm: "Not only African penguins are affected but also rare cormorants and black oyster catchers are also covered in oil."

Dr. Tony Williams: "I mean cormorants tend to get overlooked in these events. They don't get oiled as much as penguins because they - obviously when they're travelling they're flying rather than just swimming so they're able to visually spot the oil and avoid it.

"But quite often in a situation like in the harbour where the oil is trapped they've dived and they've come and then they get covered in oil.

"Now we have 4 species of cormorants on our coast and 2 of them are extremely rare on the global scale. The crown cormorant has a population of between 2½ and 3,000 pairs. That's all in the world.

"The bank cormorant has a population in the order of 4 to 5,000 globally."

Comm: "On day 6 the drama escalates dramatically. SANCCOB and Cape Nature Conservations see that several oil slicks surrounds the biggest single breeding colony of African penguins on Dasson Island.

"Now the oil spill is threatening close to half of the title world population of penguins. The rescue effort goes into top gear."

Estelle van der Merwe: "I don't think that a week ago we expected to ever have that many penguins coming into SANCCOB oiled and now we've got this whole operation of moving the clean penguins off the islands as well.

"I think if we all stop and think for a minute it is very devastating what's happened. We try at SANCCOB not to think, we're just working, trying to get the birds off, but I would like all of you to-to really think about what exactly is happening. If we had to evacuate all the penguins off Robben Island, we're nearly finished with that process, we've got a couple of thousand going and it looks like we're heading the way of Dasson Island. It remains to be seen but this is a very serious threat.

"We're looking at erm 41% of the entire world population of African penguins of our vulnerable species. I think it is far more serious than a lot of people think. Both Dasson Island and Robben Island populations were increasing and they were doing extremely well and this could really set them back seriously."

Comm: "Conservationists face a terrible dilemma, if they take the unoiled penguins off Dasson Island as a precaution and the oil never reaches the island they would unnecessarily cause the deaths of thousands of chicks. If they do nothing and the oil starts affecting the Dasson Island penguins tens of thousands of penguins will be lost because SANCCOB cannot cope with more than the 23,000 birds they already have in their centres."

Anton Wolfaardt: "Our sort of plan and focus at the moment is to fence off the very big dense colonies that are most accessible to the oil pollution and what we're doing is we're transferring some of the penguins, a lot of the penguins are outside of the wall that are unoiled we're putting them inside the exclusion wall to ensure that they don't go out to sea and are exposed to the pollution and the plan is to evacuate as many of these penguins as possible and get them off to the mail and taken up to Port Elizabeth. Our focus is on the adult birds at the moment.

"Erm we have obviously a limited erm amount of resources to be able to rescue all the penguins. They're probably in the region of 50 to 60,000 adult penguins on the island, so we just have absolutely no way of rescuing every single adult and chick."

Dr. Tony Williams: "It's the biggest dilemma I've had to face in my life. If we hadn't fenced in the island the birds would have gone to sea and they would have got into the oil. It doesn't matter that the oil isn't on the beach, it's the oil in the feeding grounds that count. The lack of a strong wind has caused the oil to wander about unpredictably and it's caught us out and we've had to take the decision now we cannot let the clean birds to go to sea. We have no capacity to feed them on the island so we're going to have to catch them and remove them and we're going to take them to Port Elizabeth and hopefully, by the time they get back here, the situation is under control."

David Daitz: "We're trying to move 15,000 penguins off Dasson Island in 3 days, unoiled penguins.

"The strategy that we're pursuing is conformed by an intension to ensure the breeding survival of the species so we're concentrating on a range of strategies which save breeding adults so that they will be able to breed again in the next breeding season. What we can't say is how many penguins that are unoiled on Dasson Island at the moment would be oiled if we allowed them to remain on Dasson Island."

Comm: "In the first 3 weeks after the oil carrier sank more than 21,000 unoiled penguins from the 2 island colonies were transported by road to Port Elizabeth and released at Cape Rosief, a thousand kilometres away from the oil slicks. Their remarkable homing instinct would take them back to their breeding colonies. It would mean that for around 20 days they would be in unpolluted waters and feeding themselves. Three of the penguins were fitted with satellite transmitters so their progress back to the breeding colonies could be monitored."

Dr. Rob Crawford: "Well this is an instrument that will send a signal to a satellite to show us where the bird is.

"The erm glue will start lifting naturally within a month. This bird is going to Port Elizabeth tonight and it will be released tomorrow and hopefully then we will be able to see what the birds that are being taken to Port Elizabeth are doing, how quick they are coming back, whether they are coming back, and that will give us some idea of the danger that they're going to be encountering of coming back to the oil again."

Comm: "The 3 penguins named Peter, Pamela and Percy immediately begin the long journey back.

"Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide follow their progress on the internet.

"Will they make it past the shark infested waters around Dire Island?

"Will the seals get them? Swimming non-stop the penguins soon round the Southern most tip of Africa.

"Meanwhile the evacuation of clean and oiled Dasson Island penguins continues with a frenzy.

"But some of the volunteers are unhappy that so many thousands of chicks and eggs are being abandoned."

Anton Wolfaardt: "The priority is definitely breeding pairs. They have a much higher survival rate. Erm naturally, even if they're not oiled.

"In an ideal world we'd like to save the chicks as well but, you know, we just have to deal with the resources we have at the moment and to set priorities."

Dr. Tony Williams: "For me, as a conservation scientist it's not actually a difficult choice. For me the protection of the further conservation of the species requires that we save the adults.

"Erm under normal circumstances the majority of chicks die in their first 6 months of life.

"Probably not more than 10 or 15% actually make it through the first year, whereas the adults, once you've got a bird to adult state it's got probably a 15 to 20 year lifetime and it can breed 2 or 3 times a year. Erm the future of the species is dependent on saving the adults here. Erm certainly we feel for the chicks and we don't like to see the chicks dying and in fact as soon as we've rescued as many adults as we can we will be going in and we will be taking off the orphans and orphans are going to be treated at several centres and for those that we aren't able to take into care we will just have to put to sleep in a-a humane fashion."

Comm: "3 weeks after the oil started leaking from the stricken ship a very special moment, the first group of birds cleaned and treated by SANCCOB are prepared for release.

"After a last good meal from a human hand and a last injection or two, they're fitted with flipper tags which will make it possible to follow their progress back to normality over the next few years.

"Once their insulative capacity has been tested they're declared fit to go back to sea.

"After the road trip to Cape Rosief they are released and start the long swim back.

"Then in the early hours of the 18^th July 20 days after his release at Cape Rosief Peter's satellite transmitter reports that he's arrived at Robben Island. Percy gets back to Dasson Island 2 days later.

"Once Robben Island is declared free of oil the several hundred young penguins rescued are taken back and released Mohammed Valli Moosa

"This single tragedy has done more than any huge marketing campaign could have done to raise the level of awareness amongst South Africans about the importance of the environment, why the environment is so sensitive and what we need to do."

Comm: "Now that the penguins have been saved the question is will they survive? Will they breed again?"

Dr. Les Underhill: "I think we can say with absolute certainty from the follow up work that we did on the Apollo seabirds that those birds do survive.

"Of the 4000 birds with flipper bands from the Apollo sea spill we saw - we have seen no less than 73% of those birds actually individually, physically. They have crossed paths with a researcher. But it's no use having birds going back living in the wild if, as a result of the petrochemical poisoning they've suffered they don't breed again. The answer to that question is yes, we do know that they breed again and within a very short period of time they appear to be breeding as well as birds that have never been oiled."

Dr. Rob Crawford: "Well we have less [unclear] the birds that were oiled if we didn't have SANCCOB which is erm 25,000 more or less, out of a world population of about 160,000. So that would have been a huge chunk into the population. And then if we didn't have nature conservation Robben Island Museum to catch the clean penguins before they got oiled that's another 20,000 so we'd have lost 45,000 out of the 160,000. And additionally of course we'd have lost all the young chicks that those 45,000 birds were caring for or would have been caring for when the eggs hatched."

Estelle van der Merwe: "Oh this has been a massive effort. It's been a huge effort. I have never ever thought, when I released how big this [unclear] was going to be that we were going to get the support we're getting, that the penguins were going to be getting the support they're getting and that people were going to be so absolutely wonderful and really to give in such a big way. I think we can all learn from this and we can all begin to have more faith in-in mankind. It has been absolutely wonderful. Thank you."

Comm: "The African penguin has survived its biggest onslaught. For a change human succeeded in undoing the damage that other humans had caused to wild animals."