Second of two parts
By Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal
One of the most memorable stories from our travels through the toughest places in the hemisphere to save birds came from the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Here, Newell’s Shearwaters and Hawaiian Petrels breed on cliffs 3,000 feet above the sea.
Scientist Andre Raine told us that the first time he dropped from a helicopter onto the nearly impassable breeding grounds, it felt like he’d landed in a zombie movie: he found the remains of hundreds of birds strewn across the cliffs, freshly killed by invasive pigs, rats, and cats.
Today, these endangered seabirds are thriving once again, aided by a host of emerging technologies and innovations that track the birds and keep threats at bay.
The mountaintop breeding areas are all cordoned off with steel fences to keep out feral pigs and cats. The birds wear electronic tags that function like grocery check-out scanners, logging their comings and goings from their burrows. Modern audio devices posted around the cliffs track the populations by recording their calls and songs.
“It’s been a long battle,” Raine told us when we visited while working on our book on bird conservation. “But it shows that management is actually working.’’
“Getting the conservation right”
Fascinating new research documents the critical role that seabirds play in the health of the oceans around the globe — findings so significant these scientists are calling for an urgent expansion of the kind of tactics that are saving Kauai’s birds.
“Seabirds are having huge impact on island biodiversity, and then you look under the water and they’re doing similar things with the nutrients and runoff,’’ said Dr. Holly Jones, an ecologist at Northern Illinois University and lead author of the study. “If we can get their conservation right, then we can have an outsized impact compared to some other species we might focus on.’’
Our post earlier this month explored how the birds, their global travel, and the tons of guano they leave behind provide nutrients that fuel oceans and islands — a phenomenon scientists call “the circular seabird economy.” Today’s piece looks at how the combination of new technologies and innovative conservation can begin to rebuild the populations after years of precipitous declines.
Growth of technological solutions
Seabirds are among the hardest species to study and safeguard. They live mostly on open seas and remote islands, with ranges that spread across massive territories, including some of the most inhospitable places on Earth. That’s why the technological advances that allow scientists to study birds from afar — often without people even being present — hold such promise.
The tools include tiny tags that track migrations; audio recordings that locate colonies, chart populations, and identify predators; genomics that pinpoint where birds travel and how their nutrients circulate based on traces of DNA; along with drones, satellite imagery, camera traps, and modern radar.
“We’re working on how to bring all these different technologies together and apply them to questions about the circular seabird economy,’’ said David Will, director of impact and innovation at the nonprofit Island Conservation and a co-author of the study. “The seabirds are the major engines that drive these ecosystems.”
Many of the more than 1,000 seabird conservation campaigns worldwide begin with removing invasive predators — feral livestock, cats, foxes and rats that arrived as humans spread to once uninhabited islands. Once the predators are gone, research based on the developing technologies targets how to rebuild the diminished populations.
Rebuilding Maine’s puffin colonies
One of the most successful seabird campaigns in North America is Project Puffin, the Audubon Society’s long-running effort to restore Atlantic Puffins to the islands along the Maine coast that lost their colonies to hunting in the prior century.
The key to restoring the colonies was an elaborate ruse designed to persuade the birds they were joining healthy flocks. The project began by gathering chicks from Canada in the 1970s to start new colonies in Maine. Then they used mirrors to make the birds think they were seeing other puffins, decoys to create the illusion of a bustling colony, and recordings to fill the cliffs with puffin chatter.
“Keeping that going was not a trivial undertaking at all,’’ said Dr. Donald Lyons, director of conservation science at Project Puffin. “Our program has really tried to take advantage of the most cutting-edge technology whenever available.’’
Today, an estimated 3,000 puffins nest across seven islands along the coast. During the breeding spring and summer season, institute staffers live on the barren, deserted islands to study the birds. Electronic tracking has enabled the institute to learn far more about these elusive seabirds once they depart on their long migrations out into the open seas.
“Before the tracking, we had very little information on their behaviors, where they went, and what they did,’’ Lyons said. “With that information, we’ve been able to promote protecting areas of the marine environment.’’
Using genomics to help birds
Another ambitious seabird rescue project uses DNA samples collected from 30 islands around the world to track how the birds — and the nutrients they leave behind — can improve stressed marine environments. California-based Island Conservation and the Minderoo Foundation from Australia are distributing genomic tools that enable researchers to analyze land and water for telltale DNA from wildlife, fish, and nutrients.
“For example, we’re taking samples from islands where there are seabirds and from islands that don’t have them, and asking: what are the differences in the DNA signatures?’’ Will explained. “Then we can start to establish a baseline for what a healthy system looks like.’’
Strong data forces action
One of the most powerful tools for seabird research is the science of sound. In the early days of the Kauai seabird rescue, Andre Raine who leads the campaign needed to prove that the island’s power lines were killing far more protected seabirds than the utility company acknowledged. So he and his team set up audio recorders along the lines to capture the loud “ping’’ of birds hitting wires. “We thought since it made a really audible sound, that was something we could record,’’ Raine told us.
The results were startling: seabirds struck the wires nine times more often than originally estimated. The data forced the electric company to put safeguards in place, including moving some wires underground. The company also agreed to pay into a fund required by the Endangered Species Act that now helps underwrite the protection strategy in the mountain breeding grounds.
The need for more research
Although the new findings on seabirds have advanced understanding of their importance, scientists say they’re still in the early stages of charting the complex cycles driven by these birds.
Many islands have yet to undertake the kind of conservation that restored puffins to Maine or protects petrels and shearwaters in Hawaii. Population estimates for the world’s 300-plus seabird species are outdated and often little more than rough guesses. And researchers don’t yet know whether today’s efforts have slowed — or perhaps halted — the sharp declines seabirds suffered over the last half-century.
Holly Jones, the lead author on the “seabird economy’’ work, hopes the findings will spur more research and conservation that she says are desperately needed to help the birds deliver on their key role in the environment. She worries, though, that scientific research has been cut back in many places, notably in the United States that has traditionally led avian studies, at the very time scientists are coming up with remedies that make a difference.
“We just need more folks interested in doing this because there’s so much more that we don’t know than we do,’’ she said. “These are endangered species that a lot of people never even see, but they have huge impacts on the oceans and islands that affect people.’’
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