14 penguins die in Hilvarenbeek after surviving earlier disease in Leeuwarden zoo
Fourteen African penguins have died in the safari park Beekse Bergen in Hilvarenbeek over the past few months. Eleven of these birds were previously transferred from AquaZoo in Leeuwarden after they were the only ones to survive an unknown disease there, NOS reports.
AquaZoo decided to stop keeping penguins after the disease wiped out a large part of the colony. The cause or source of the disease never became clear. The surviving penguins went to Beekse Bergen.
The penguins weren’t sick when they were transferred, a spokesperson for the safari park said to Omroep Brabant. “But later, they unfortunately developed symptoms similar to the penguins that died earlier in AquaZoo.”
Safari park employees and external experts examined the animals, but couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Utrecht University performed an autopsy, but also could not determine the cause of death.
“They got sick, restless, started eating poorly. We think it was a virus, but we don’t know,” Martin van Hees, the zoological manager at Beekse Bergen, said on NPO Radio 1. The pathologists at the university ran all sorts of tests. “We were able to rule out a lot of things, for example, that it wasn’t bird flu.” But the tests did not reveal the cause of death.
Eleven of the penguins came from AquaZoo and died of disease. The other three penguins had been at the park for longer. They did not die of illness, according to the park.
Beekse Bergen is still home to 52 African penguins. “We don’t see anything wrong with the other penguins at the moment,” Van Hees said. “There are no signs that other animals are getting sick.”
