ACAP releases eight artwork posters for World Albatross Day

“Lost in a Rising Sea” Black-footed Albatross by Kitty Harvill, after a photograph by Koa Matsuoka

The Albatross and Petrel Agreement has chosen the theme “Climate Change” to mark the third World Albatross Day, to be celebrated on 19 June 2022.  This follows the inaugural theme “Eradicating Island Pests” in 2020 and “Ensuring Albatross-friendly Fisheries” last year.

The featured species chosen for 2022 are two of the three species of albatrosses that breed in the North Pacific: the Black-footed Phoebastria nigripes and the Laysan P. immutabilis.  Both these globally Near Threatened albatrosses have most of their breeding populations on the low-lying atolls of the USA’s North-Western Hawaiian Islands.  These atolls - and their breeding seabirds - are all at risk from predicted sea level rise and increases in the number and severity of storms that result in flooding, both considered a consequence of climate change.  Storm floods have even caused at least one small sandy islet to disappear into the sea, losing breeding sites for several thousand albatross pairs (click here); elsewhere in the island chain, as on Midway Atoll, storms have caused flooding of albatross nests and loss of chicks close to the shore.

ACAP’s WAD poster designer, Michelle Risi, now based on Aldabra Atoll for two years after an extended stay on Gough Island, has produced eight posters featuring selected artworks produced by Artists and Biologists Unite for Nature (ABUN) in a collaboration with ACAP for World Albatross Day 2022.  The high resolution artwork posters have been made freely available from here for printing during the build up to World Albatross Day on 19 June.  French and Spanish versions are to follow.  ACAP requests it be acknowledged in their use for conservation purposes.  They should not be used for financial gain.  You can view them from here on this website and also in an ACAP Facebook album.

Also view the 12 photo posters produced by Michelle Risi for WAD2022.

With thanks to Michelle Risi and to ABUN artists Flávia Barreto, Georgia Feild, Kitty Harvill, Grace Innemee, Virginia Nicol, Ilana Nimz, Tatiana Petrova and Andrea Siemt, as well as to photographers Laurie Smaglick Johnson, Koa Matsuoka, J.A. Soriano and Lindsay Young.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 11 May 2022, updated 12 May 2022