Pacific Rim Conservation will host a free three-day workshop on seabird translocation and social attraction on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu over 19-21 May 2020.  The number of participants will be limited to 25.

The emphasis will be on “the nuts and bolts of field-based translocation techniques.  Participants will learn relevant background needed during the classroom component (1 day), and then get basic training in avian husbandry, diet preparation, and hand feeding techniques during the field-based component (1-2 days).  The goal of this workshop is to increase capacity for organizations to conduct seabird translocations in new locations and species worldwide,”

One day of lectures from Hawaiian and New Zealand experts in Honolulu will be followed by two days of field work in the James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge on Oahu’s north shore covering diet preparation; food storage; seabird handling; weighing, and measuring; feeding; and cleaning, sanitation and husbandry practices.

The 2018 cohort of translocated Black-footed Albatross Phoebastria nigripes chicks soon after arrival at the James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge

Photograph from Pacific Rim Conservation

Click here for the workshop schedule, including information on talks and presenters, and how to apply.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 08 November 2019

Each year Australians and New Zealanders get the chance to vote for their favourite bird in Bird of the Year (BOTY) competitions. 

The Aussies have come up with 50 birds on their list this year; but only two on the voting list of 50 are seabirds.  These two marine birds are the Little Penguin Eudyptula minor and the only procellariiform species, the Short-tailed Shearwater Ardenna tenuirostris, a species currently of some concern as the back migration from Alaskan waters to islands around Tasmania is running late and so far very few birds are being seen, pehaps due to die-offs in the northern hemisphere (click here and here).  Might this lead to a change from its Least Concern status?

Unfortunately, the shearwater is currently coming third last in the 48th position with only 157 votes at the time of writing, so it looks very much like it will not get past the first round (nor it seems will the penguin, which is currently in the 16th position).  Albatross and petrel lovers are not completely left out, however, as the opportunity exists for a write-in species (but it “must have wings”).  ACAP-listed Shy Albatross Thalassarche cauta, endemic to Australia and globally Near Threatened, anyone?  Move fast though as at the end of the first round the 10 birds with the most votes will automatically make it to the final round of voting, and the first round closes at the end of this week on 8 November!

Over in New Zealand, often deemed the “seabird capital of the world”, the BOTY 2019 choice is far better for the fish-eaters (unlike in Australia, there are no less that 10 ACAP-listed albatrosses and petrels on the BOTY list) – and the rules are rather different.  “The organiser of the annual avian electoral race, Forest & Bird, is using a Single Transferable Voting (STV) system this year where Kiwis can rank their five favourite native birds.”  Voting closes at 127h00 [local time] on this Sunday (10th). To cast your vote, click here.

Antipodean Albatross (Gibson's subspecies) on Adams Island, Auckland Islands, photograph by Colin O'Donnell

So where does the globally Endangered (and nationally Critical) Antipodean Albatross Diomedea antipodensis fit in?  It’s the first choice of ACAP’s Executive Secretary (and Kiwi), Christine Bogle of course!  Not to be outdone, New Zealand’s Minister of Conservation, Eugenie Sage MP has announced on her Facebook page “this year I’m officially backing the Gibson's albatross for Forest & Bird's Bird of the Year 2019”.  ACAP recognizes Gibson’s Albatross of the Auckland Islands as a subspecies, gibsoni, of the Antipodean, so that’s really two votes for a species that has been recognized as of special concern by ACAP.  It’s also a species up for listing on Appendix 1 of the Convention on Migratory Species because of its threatened status next year – as tomorrow’s post to ACAP Latest News will detail.

"Diomedea antipodensis gibsoni are among the largest of the world’s seabirds. They live to 50-60 years if they manage to avoid being hooked on a fishing longline. They only breed on the remote Auckland Islands and they fly to the seas off Chile and southern Australia to feed. Their numbers have declined dramatically and they need our help." - Eugenie Sage MP

Lastly, what about the Whenua Hou Diving Petrel Pelecanoides whenuahouensis, New Zealand’s newest (too new even to have yet got a global category of threat) and it seems, rarest seabird?  It’s not ACAP-listed but another New Zealander, Igor Debski, Co-convenor of ACAP’s Seabird Bycatch Working Group, has the “Flying Penguin” as his first choice, writing to ALN: “it’s been rather overlooked previously and at less than 100 pairs, and at high risk to climate change, I think it really needs a lift in its profile.”

But maybe all academic, yesterday’s news is that that with only a few days of voting left there the only seabird in the top five so far is the globally Endangered Yellow-eyed Penguin or Hoiho Megadyptes antipodes.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 05 November 2019

Oliver Padget (Department of Zoology, Oxford University, UK) and colleagues have published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) on homing ability of Manx Shearwaters Puffinus puffinus.

The paper’s abstract follows:

“While displacement experiments have been powerful for determining the sensory basis of homing navigation in birds, they have left unresolved important cognitive aspects of navigation such as what birds know about their location relative to home and the anticipated route.  Here, we analyze the free-ranging Global Positioning System (GPS) tracks of a large sample (n = 707) of Manx shearwater, Puffinus puffinus, foraging trips to investigate, from a cognitive perspective, what a wild, pelagic seabird knows as it begins to home naturally.  By exploiting a kind of natural experimental contrast (journeys with or without intervening obstacles) we first show that, at the start of homing, sometimes hundreds of kilometers from the colony, shearwaters are well oriented in the homeward direction, but often fail to encode intervening barriers over which they will not fly (islands or peninsulas), constrained to flying farther as a result.  Second, shearwaters time their homing journeys, leaving earlier in the day when they have farther to go, and this ability to judge distance home also apparently ignores intervening obstacles.  Thus, at the start of homing, shearwaters appear to be making navigational decisions using both geographic direction and distance to the goal.  Since we find no decrease in orientation accuracy with trip length, duration, or tortuosity, path integration mechanisms cannot account for these findings.  Instead, our results imply that a navigational mechanism used to direct natural large-scale movements in wild pelagic seabirds has map-like properties and is probably based on large-scale gradients.

Manx Shearwater, photograph by Nathan Fletcher

Read a popular account here.

Reference:

Padget, O., Stanley, G., Willis, J.K., Fayet, A.L., Bond, S., Maurice, L., Shoji, A., Dean, B., Kirk, h., Juarez-Martinez, I., Freeman, R., Bolton, M. & Guilford, T. 2019.  Shearwaters know the direction and distance home but fail to encode intervening obstacles after free-ranging foraging trips.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America  doi.org/10.5441/001/1.k20j58qt.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 04 November 2019

Caitlin Kroeger (Department of Ocean Sciences, Long Marine Lab, University of California, Santa Cruz, California, USA) has been awarded a PhD for her thesis on sympatric breeding Campbell Thalassarche impavida and Grey-headed Albatrosses T. chrysostoma during incubation and early-chick-rearing stages on New Zealand’s Campbell Island.

The abstract of her thesis follows:

“The modulation of energy balance through physiological or behavioral adjustments (i.e., allostasis) allows organisms to cope with unexpected challenges, ensuring reproductive success and survival. However, energetic challenges can be exacerbated during critical life stages such as breeding, when more resources are needed to feed offspring. Amphibious marine organisms like seabirds already face a unique challenge of finding patchily distributed ephemeral prey within a vast, dynamic ocean and delivering prey to hungry chicks at land-based nests. With the depletion of ozone and rising sea temperatures, atmospheric and oceanographic disruptions are escalating, affecting the distribution of prey in addition to altering windscapes that seabirds, like the glider-shaped albatrosses, rely on for traveling. Metabolic stress hormones in seabirds can be used to indicate adverse changes within the environment; however, the functional role of stress hormones is confounded by factors such as species, life history, or breeding stage. In chapter 2, I used structural equation models to improve our understanding of the role of corticosterone, a stress hormone, as a mediator of energy balance in two sympatric breeding albatrosses during incubation and early-chick-rearing stages. Campbell (Thalassarche impavida) and grey-headed albatrosses (T. chrysostoma) are annual and biennial breeders, respectively, that occupy differing prey niches. By measuring foraging behavior, mass change, and hormone levels, I found that corticosterone concentrations before and after foraging trips were similar between species and across stages, potentially because of behavioral flexibility or different corticosterone functional roles across stages. However, when parents were provisioning small chicks during the guard stage, the former were more sensitive to changes in energy balance, suggesting that hormone concentrations elicited during this stage are indicative of foraging conditions. Also, pre-trip corticosterone may determine foraging destination in incubation-stage Campbell albatrosses, but it remains unclear if this mediates foraging success. In chapter 3, I examined the role of environmental interactions, behavioral flexibility, and morphological constraints on energy balance during early chick-rearing using the doubly labelled water method to estimate the daily energy expenditure (DEE) of GPS tracked individuals. In both species, greater DEE was associated with greater foraging success, lower mean wind speeds during water take-offs, a greater proportion of strong tailwinds (> 12 ms-1), and younger chick age. Greater foraging success was marginally costlier in male albatrosses of both species and DEE was higher in grey-headed albatrosses when they experienced a greater proportion of strong headwinds. Climate models predict wind speeds will weaken in the foraging range of female Campbell albatrosses and intensify in the range of grey-headed and male Campbell albatrosses, thus breeding costs may increase for both species. In chapter 4, I used a flight cost function to show that mean flight costs were greater during the incubation stage for grey-headed albatrosses, which may interrupt breeding cycles. I then used reanalyzed wind data in combination with bird-borne GPS tracking data to score the cost of flight path trajectory choices and to calculate vector correlation coefficients to evaluate wind-use consistency. Greater wind-use consistency resulted in lower mean flight costs and greater foraging success for both species, but Campbell albatrosses that use low-wind regions had the greatest wind-use consistency. Males of both species gained less mass than females when making similar cost choices during incubation stage transit. Chick-rearing individuals of both species traded greater cost choices for greater foraging success during outbound transit. Overall, foraging strategy, mediated by hormones and morphology, revealed energetic vulnerabilities with respect to species, sex, and breeding stage.”

Note that thesis is “is under embargo until March 20, 2020”.  Access more of Caitlin’s research here.

A Campbell (right) and a Grey-headed Albatross interact on Campbell Island

Reference:

Kroeger, C.E. 2019.  Stress hormones, foraging energetics, and wind-use patterns in two sympatrically breeding southern albatrosses.  PhD thesis.  University of California Santa Cruz.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 01 November 2019