ACAP is particularly pleased to be able to collaborate with ABUN (Artists & Biologists Unite for Nature) with its 30th Project that will lead to the creation of a World Albatross Day banner to help illustrate the conservation crisis that continues to be faced by the world’s 22 species of albatrosses.  The involvement of nature and wildlife artists in this way will enable the general public to become more aware of the problem and thus be able to lend their support to helping save these majestic birds.

Artists & Biologists Unite for Nature was founded by Brazilian-based Kitty Harvill and Christoph Hrdina in 2016.  ABUN is a collection of nature and wildlife artists, serving the conservation community with their images for use in promoting awareness.  “We range from beginners and hobby artists, children and adults to seasoned professionals, joined together by our love of nature and desire to be of service to that cause, the process of creating art and the respect for all artistic expressions produced in the group.”

Kitty writes enthusiastically on ABUN’s Facebook page on the first day of the new year: “ABUN #30 - WORLD ALBATROSS DAY is 'Live'.  With all 22 species we will be bringing you a species every few days to give you more information regarding details such as specific traits, range, etc.  Enjoy this wonderful project - let's UNITE to give ACAP some beautiful artwork to use in their celebration this 19 June for the FIRST World Albatross Day!!”

Artists wishing to contribute to ABUN #30 have until 29 February to submit their artwork for posting.  ACAP has supplied over 130 photographs featuring all 22 species to the ABUN album that artists can use as inspiration (although they may produce their art from other photos, or from direct observation or their imagination).  There is no limit to the number of paintings each artist may submit, although each artist will be limited to a maximum of four images on the World Albatross Day banner that ABUN will create for ACAP’s use after the project ends in two months’ time.  A bonus is that the artists give the right to ACAP to use the images of their paintings as educational and marketing material once they have been posted.

The thousand ABUN members are clearly an enthusiastic lot.  In less than 48 hours of launching the project, three of them have already submitted their artwork - as illustrated here along with the ACAP photos that inspired them.  Pleasing also to note is the friendly way they interact online encouraging each other.  ACAP’S Information Officer is looking forward to working with ABUN over the next two months – he expects to be kept busy!

 Oli Yates photographed this Black-browed Albatross on Beauchene Island (right) in the South Atlantic in November 2005; Arkansas-based Sue DuVall made the painting (left)

ABUN artist Lea Finke has painted this globally Endangered Grey-headed Albatross that was photographed on its pedestal nest on Marion Island by PhD student Stefan Schoombie

Read more about how ABUN works here.

Kitty Harvill has featured in ACAP Latest News before.  She is the illustrator of the children’s book on Wisdom, the female Laysan Albatross who is  the world’s oldest known bird (see ALN’s review), still going strong at an estimated 69 years of age.

With grateful thanks to Kitty Harvill, all the ABUN artists and to all the many photographers who have generously allowed their work to be used by ACAP in the service of albatross conservation. You may well get a painting by an ABUN artist to go with your photo!

This pencil drawing of a globally Vulnerable Short-tailed Albatross for ABUN#30 is by Georgia Feild from the USA

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 03 January 2020

A Northern Giant Petrel Macronectes halli was photographed off the coast of Washington, USA in the North Pacific on 8 December 2019 from the vessel Pacific Hustler while it was fishing for Black Cod or Sablefish Anoplopoma fimbria.  The bird can be identified specifically by the reddish tip to its bill.  Based on its rather uniform dark plumage it does not appear to be an adult.

Northern Giant Petrels breed on sub-Antarctic islands in the Southern Ocean with a circumpolar oceanic distribution recorded north to 25-28ºS, so the photographed bird was indeed a long way from home.

The Northern Giant Petrel along with Black-footed Albatrosses Phoebastria nigripes and dark-phase Arctic Fulmars Fulmarus glacialis, photograph by Zed Blue

Checking my home library it seems this may be the first definite trans-equatorial record of a Northern Giant Petrel (although a Southern Giant Petrel M. giganteus has been sighted north of the Equator in the Atlantic).

Information from the Western Washington Birders.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 02 January 2020

Over two summers from 2006 to 2008 I lived on Gough Island in the South Atlantic where – among other tasks – I and colleagues set up a long-term study colony of biennially breeding and Critically Endangered Tristan Albatrosses Diomedea dabbenena in a mountain valley known as Gonydale  The main purpose was to learn more about the birds’ breeding success and survival rate in the face of onslaughts by the island’s introduced House Mice Mus musculus that attack and cause the death of their downy chicks during the austral winters.

Mice attack a Tristan Albatross chick at night - it did not survive; photograph by Ross Wanless

In the decade since then successive teams of dedicated field biologists have continued every year to monitor the albatrosses that we first colour banded and staked, recording their less than natural breeding success and too often witnessing dead and dying chicks after nights of attacks by mice.  Such sights are hard to take, even for biologists used to watching predation and mortality in the field.  In 2017/18 Australian Kate Lawrence, veteran of two seasons of albatross research on Macquarie Island, was no exception, writing movingly of watching mice kill an Endangered Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross Thalassarche chlororhynchos chick at night on Gough, saying as she watched it die that she felt: “incredibly sad and sick to my stomach”.

KIate recovers marker poles from failed Tristan Albatross nests due to mice during a heart-breaking survey in the Gonydale study colony on Gough Island, July 2018

Mouse attacks on Gough’s adult albatrosses have been reported on in the last two years (click here), making next year’s eradication attempt by the Gough Island Restoration Programme (GIRP) even more urgent – loss of breeding adults will cause species’ declines and possible local extinction faster than if only chicks are killed.  Kate returns to Gough Island this coming February on the New Zealand-registered expedition yacht Evohe as a GIRP Field Specialist.  She will be helping set up aviculture facilities, catching endemic and Critically Endangered Gough Finches Rowettia goughensis and Vulnerable Gough Moorhens Gallinula comeri (both considered at risk to non-target poisoning from the eradication exercise) and then helping with the husbandry of the captive birds.

Predation by mice on albatrosses on Gough, as well as on Marion and Midway Islands, was a compelling impetus for choosing the theme “Eradicating Island Pests” for next year’s inaugural World Albatross Day (WAD2020) on 19 June.

Before returning to Gough Island Kate has written to ACAP Latest News in support of WAD2020:

“I have been showing the baby to everyone and asking what they think it is and they always say a penguin!" was one response I got when I sent a photo of a Light-mantled Albatross [Phoebetria palpebrata] chick, alone and alert on its nest on Macquarie Island, to family and friends.  It reinforced to me how privileged I was to be working with such amazing creatures, species that many people do not get the chance to encounter in their lifetime.  World Albatross Day is an opportunity and a reminder to share our experiences far and wide, to highlight the conservation needs of these majestic birds and to spread the albatross love!”

With the love and commitment to help that biologists like Kate feel towards the world’s threatened albatrosses ACAP Latest News expects she and her GIRP colleagues will have a successful campaign on Gough in 2020.  I for one will be waiting anxiously to hear that the albatrosses I banded in Gonydale will be able to breed successfully at last.

Recording Tristan Albatross nest data on Gough, January 2018

Photographs of Kate Lawrence by Jaimie Cleeland

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 01 January 2020

Eight years ago I posted an article to ACAP Latest News that commenced:

“In 2000 I visited Midway Atoll in the North Pacific on an excursion after the Second International Conference on the Biology and Conservation of Albatrosses and other Petrels that had been held in Honolulu, Hawaii in May that year.  While on the island I was appalled by the many corpses of Laysan Albatross Phoebastria immutabilis chicks strewn around with their body cavities crammed with plastic debris fed to them by their parents, including cigarette lighters, bottle tops, toothbrushes and even toy soldiers and action heroes.  This led to my co-authoring a paper on colour selection by North Pacific albatrosses, suggesting that they prefer red, pink and orange cigarette lighters to blue and green ones, presumably mistaking them for edible prey (click here).  It is clear that a decade later the problem has not gone away.”

This year I reprised my post to mark World Migratory Bird Day (click here).  Two decades after my Midway visit the problem continues as evocatively set out in the freely-distributed film ‘Albatross’ by Chris Jordan, and in his photographs above.

Quite probably most Midway visitors pick up a plastic item or two from one of the many albatross corpses that litter the island to take home to show friends or just to display in their office as a reminder.  My own souvenir (left below) was given to me by marine ornithologist Rosemary Gales when I challenged our post-conference party to find action figures.  Australian biologist and World Seabird Union Vice-Chair Nicholas Carlile was also with us on Midway and still carefully looks after his own GI Joe find (right below).  Some have used their plastic pieces to illustrate talks.  More ambitious have been the several mounted displays and artworks created from the gathered plastic lighters, toys and fragments.  ACAP Latest News has brought together a few examples of these on the last day of the decade in a reflective mood and in an endeavour to increase awareness of how plastic ingestion continues to affect albatrosses and petrels.

Betty Anne Schreiber, marine ornithologist and the World Seabird Union’s Treasurer, has an early Midway Laysan Albatross collection - carefully displayed - from the 1980s (below left).

Marine biologist Heidi Auman made her own plastic toy display (above right) from Laysan Albatross corpses on Midway Atoll a decade later from 1993 to 1995.  I first met her on the atoll in 2000 when I obtained my own action figure.  Influenced by the levels of pollution on the island she later wrote ‘Garbage Guts’ for children (see the ALN review).  Included with her collection is a syringe: seemingly Laysan Albatrosses are not fussy what they swallow, more’s the pity.

Jan van Franeker, senior scientist at Wageningen Marine Research in the Netherlands, who studies plastic pollution in North Atlantic seabirds, writes: “Images say more than words.  I pulled toothbrushes, tampon-holders, combs, lighters and lots of other stuff out of the ribcages of a few decayed corpses of Laysan Albatross chicks on Midway Atoll in 2000.  Whenever I give a presentation on the problems of marine plastic litter for tube-nosed seabirds, I carry this small collection [below] with me. It is one of the stories that needs to be told.”

Sheldon Plentovich, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Pacific Islands Coastal Program Coordinator has her own story: “In 2007 I worked on Kure Atoll for several months.  I camped there and one of the Laysan Albatross chicks living nearby thought I was interesting.  She would investigate all my belongings and come inside and make herself at home when I unzipped the door.  About a month before the bird was going to fledge, she started looking sick and eventually died.  This is a mural of the contents of her stomach.  There is a Hello Kitty doll in the middle.”

Jennifer Urmstom, MS student in Marine Science at the Hawai'i Pacific University, has used her plastic collection to depict a Laysan Albatross (below).

Hawaiian-based marine biologist, volunteer nurse, sailor, author, columnist (read her 14 December column on mooning next to albatrosses) and artist Sue Scott has created mosaics she calls “The Lighter Side of Albatrosses”.  She describes her work: “I found all the pieces in albatross colonies and on beaches.  The plastic survived wind, waves and tropical sun.  Barnacles attach to it, crabs float on it, bryozoans encrust it, sharks bite it, and seabirds swallow it, perhaps because flying fish lay eggs on it.  After all this, the colors stay vivid (I clean the pieces, but don't paint them) and the plastic holds its shape.  My albatross images represent the positive in seabird survival, beach clean-ups and recycling.  I don't sell my art.  It belongs to the albatrosses. They find the lighters.”  Her piece below made out of plastic cigarette lighters is entitled "Flotsam in Flight".

It seems that reduction at source is the only way the problem of albatrosses ingesting plastic items is going to be solved.  Not an easy task!

With thanks to Heidi Auman, Nicholas Carlile, Rosemary Gales, Sheldon Plentovich, Susan Scott, Betty Anne Schreiber, Jennifer Urmstom and Jan van Franeker.

Reference:

Cooper, J. Auman, H.J. & Klavitter, J. 2004.  Do the albatrosses of Midway Atoll select cigarette lighters by color?  Pacific Seabirds 31: 2-4.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 31 December 2019