Humboldt penguins are among Peru’s most threatened seabirds. Until recently, the Punta San Juan Reserve on Peru’s southern coast supported the country’s largest Humboldt penguin colony and one of the largest concentrations of seabirds on Earth. In late 2022, avian influenza devastated marine wildlife along the Peruvian coast. Combined with the effects of an El Niño event in early 2023, the outbreak wiped out the reserve’s entire penguin colony, reducing its population from approximately 2,500 birds to zero.
Photographer and high-school educator Ana Elisa Sotelo has documented the birds and conservation efforts at Punta San Juan for more than a decade. In this project, she follows Dr. Susana Cárdenas-Alayza, director of the Reserve, and her team of scientists as they work to understand whether the colony can recover from repeated environmental shocks.
As a forecasted “Super El Niño” approaches the Peruvian coast, Sotelo returns to the reserve to document both the vulnerability of the recovering colony and the people dedicated to protecting it. The project examines the state of the colony and how conservation scientists navigate recurring ecological crises while confronting uncertainty about the future of one of Peru’s most important wildlife populations.
