Boulders Beach is a sheltered cove of granite boulders and white sand on the False Bay side of the Cape Peninsula, at Simon's Town near Cape Town in South Africa, where a colony of a few thousand African penguins nests in the open a few metres from the visitors, one of only two mainland colonies of a species that is now critically endangered. The penguins arrived on their own: two pairs came ashore in 1982 from the island colonies offshore and bred, and the colony grew into the thousands under the protection of the town, nesting in burrows under the bushes and among the boulders; a boardwalk drops from the car park to rail level with a packed stretch of sand where the birds preen, doze and bray between the rocks, unbothered by the people on the other side of the rail, and in the neighbouring public cove swimmers wade into the same sheltered, boulder-calmed water the colony fishes in, with penguins darting past underwater. They were long called jackass penguins for a loud, braying call that sounds startlingly like a donkey, the sound that fills the cove from dawn to dusk.
The boulders themselves are older than backbones, rounded granite of the Cape Granite Suite that cooled underground about 540 million years ago, and they break the swell of False Bay so that the water inside is calm and a few degrees warmer than the Atlantic side of the peninsula. Once a year every adult penguin sheds all its feathers at once and cannot swim or feed for three weeks, standing miserable and puffed on the sand, and the chicks in grey down are seen from spring. The species has fallen by more than ninety percent in a century as the sardines it eats were fished out, and the few thousand here are among its last strongholds. Boulders is a beach that penguins chose, and the town built a rail rather than a fence.