“Seabird Bycatch Solutions for Fisheries Sustainability” is a free, downloadable guide produced by the American Bird Conservancy that addresses how seabirds interact with fisheries and how to reduce bycatch.  The following information is taken from the ABC press release.

“Seabird bycatch is an enormous problem for sustainability of fisheries and conservation of seabirds, with at least 720 000 seabirds killed annually in longline and gillnet fisheries.  To help fisheries managers avoid seabird bycatch, American Bird Conservancy has created a free, comprehensive guide that provides a wealth of information on seabird ecology, protection, and conservation.  “Seabird Bycatch Solutions for Fishery Sustainability” covers how seabirds interact with fisheries, how to reduce bycatch of seabirds, and how to evaluate seabird bycatch under frameworks such as Marine Stewardship Council certification.

Twin bird-scaring lnes behind a South African demersal trawler, photograph by Barry Watkins

"The manual offers 71 pages packed with useful information on seabirds.  It's designed to help those reviewing or evaluating fisheries for sustainability, or seeking practical guidance on seabird bycatch reduction in fisheries, to quickly find the help they need.  Illustrated with images and animations, it presents key information concisely, and serves as a complementary resource to ABC's Seabird Maps and Information for Fisheries website.

Created for fisheries managers and evaluators, biologists, regulators, and fishers, the manual provides essential information on topics including:

• Bycatch and mortality of seabirds in marine fisheries: how do seabirds interact with different fishing gear? What are the ways they can be caught or injured?
• Risks and best practices: how can fisheries managers and others avoid seabird bycatch? For some gear types there are very effective and inexpensive solutions.
• How to evaluate seabirds within a Marine Stewardship Council certification process: how do the new Fishery Certification Requirements take into account seabirds and seabird bycatch? This section covers all of the MSC Performance Indicators related to seabirds.
• Legal status and conservation of seabirds: how do various agreements, governments, and organizations around the world protect seabirds?

Additional sections provide background on seabird diversity and ecology; best practices for managing the forage fish upon which seabirds depend; resources such as additional web tools to assist fisheries evaluators and biologists in assessing risks and reducing bycatch; and more.

The manual is available free for download in two versions.  The animations in the smaller version (25 MB) require access to the Internet (YouTube).  The larger version (100 MB) contains embedded animations, and once downloaded can be viewed without Internet access."

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 18 April 2016

Ana Sanz-Aguilar (Population Ecology Group, Instituto Mediterráneo de Estudios Avanzados, Esporles, Islas Baleares, Spain) and colleagues have published in the journal Biological Conservation showing that a stable breeding colony of Scopoli's Shearwater Calonectris diomedea is sustained by immigration and thus acts as a ‘conservation sink’.

The paper’s abstract follows:

“Populations of long-lived species are highly sensitive to increases in mortality, but a loss of breeders can be compensated for by recruitment of local individuals or immigrants.  Populations maintained through immigration can be sinks, jeopardizing the viability of the metapopulation in the long term when additive mortality from anthropogenic impacts occurs.  Thus, the correct identification of whether a breeding population is maintained by local recruitment or by immigration is of special importance for conservation purposes.  We developed robust population models to disentangle the importance of local recruitment and immigration in the dynamics of a Western Mediterranean population of Scopoli's shearwater Calonectris diomedea showing low adult survival but stable breeding numbers.  Our results show that the shearwater population is not self-maintained but rescued by immigration: yearly immigrants recruiting in the population represents ~ 10–12% of total population size.  We believe that this situation may be common to other Western Mediterranean populations, currently acting as sinks.  We recommend urgent demographic studies at large core colonies to evaluate the global conservation status of the species.”

Scopoli's Shearwaters, photograph by Paulo Catry

Reference:

Sanz-Aguilar, A., Igual,J.-M., Tavecchia, G., Genovart, M. & Oro, D. 2016.  When immigration mask threats: The rescue effect of a Scopoli's shearwater colony in the Western Mediterranean as a case study.  Biological Conservation 198: 33-36.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 15 April 2016

Full (or empty?) house achieved: the last translocated chick has fledged.  Here it is readying its wings for flight the day before on its flower-pot nest.  Note the leg band to help track its fortunes.

A total of 110 ACAP-listed and Vulnerable ChathamAlbatross Thalassarche eremita chicks was moved from the Pyramid, the species’ sole breeding site, to Point Gap on the main Chatham Island in 2014 and 2105 in an effort to establish a new breeding colony.  The chicks were hand fed on fish and squid until they fledged, only six not surviving due to heat stress (click here).

Following this success the Chatham Islands Taiko Trust transferred a further 50 chicks for the third year of the project in February (click here).

This year’s chicks have been fledging this month, with just one left expected to go by 15 April; the first two chicks fledged on 31 March.  It is intended to continue translocations for a further two years.

The last few chicks to fledge from the 2016 cohort among adult decoys, photographs courtesy of the Chatham Islands Taiko Trust

Access past news about the translocation project here.  More photos of the 2016 translocation are on the Trust’s Facebook page.

Reference:

Bell, M. 2015.  Establishing a new colony of Chatham Island Albatross in the Chatham Islands, New Zealand.  Sea Swallow 64: 4-8.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 14 April 2016, updated 16 April 2016

The Ninth Meeting of ACAP’s Advisory Committee (AC9) will be held in La Serena, Chile next month from the 9th to the 13th.  It will be preceded by the Seventh Meeting of the AC’s Seabird Bycatch Working Group from 2 to 4 May and the Third Meeting of the AC’s Population and Conservation Status Working Group on 5 and 6 May.  The three meetings will be held at the beach-side Hotel Club La Serena.  La Serena is a coastal town 470 km north of Santiago, the capital of Chile.

Ten of the Agreement’s 13 Parties are expected to be present.  In addition, three non-Party Range States (Canada, Namibia and the USA) will be attending as observers.  Three international non-governmental organizations will also attend the meetings as observers.  They are:

BirdLife International
Humane Society International
Oikonos

NGOs and other organizations from five countries are also listed to attend:

American Bird Conservancy, USA
Colorado State University, USA
Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, UK
Grupo de Ecología y Conservación de Islas, Mexico
One Health Institute, University of California, Davis, USA
Instituto de Fomento Pesquero, Chile
Island Conservation, Chile
Projeto Albatroz, Brazil

Click here for a list of expected meeting participants to AC9 by name and affiliation.

Sooty Albatross near Amsterdam Island, photograph by Kirk Zufelt

AC9 will be chaired by Mark Tasker, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, United Kingdom.  The ACAP Secretariat will be represented by Marco Favero, Executive Secretary, Wiesława Misiak, Science Officer and John Cooper, Information Officer, along with Juan Pablo Seco Pon of Argentina and an interpretation team.

Documents and Information Papers for the three meetings are now available on this website.  Note that some are password protected, with only summaries publically available.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 13 April 2016