The New Zealand NGO, Forest & Bird, is once more holding its annual competition to choose the country’s most popular bird; the competition has been running since 2005.  So far no ACAP-listed albatross or petrel has been chosen as New Zealand’s Bird of the Year.

This year New Zealand endemics and ACAP-listed Vulnerable Black Procellaria parkinsoni and Endangered Westland P. westlandica Petrels are both listed.  You can also vote for an albatross, with 10 threatened species that breed in New Zealand named in the category.

Two other procellariiform seabirds on the voting list are the globally Endangered Hutton’s Shearwater Puffinus huttoni and the recently described and thought Critically Endangered Whenua Hou Diving Petrel Pelecanoides whenuahouensis, known from just one breeding site on Codfish Island (Whenua Hou) in very small numbers.

Whenua Hou Diving Petrel, photograph by Jake Osborne

In November 2016 Hutton’s Shearwater suffered a major blow when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake badly affected its sole breeding habitat in South Island’s Seaward Kaikoura Range, destroying around 15% of the mountainous area and possibly killing as many as 200 000 individuals (click here).

Voting is now open: visit www.birdoftheyear.org.nz to cast your vote before 15 October for a chance to win a trip to New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic islands.

“Bird of the Year is a fun celebration of our native taonga [treasure], but there’s a serious side. Eighty percent of our bird species are threatened with extinction, with a third in serious trouble. They face threats ranging from habitat destruction, to predators such as stoats, possums, and rats who eat eggs, chicks, and even adult birds.”

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 02 October 2018

The globally Vulnerable Yelkouan Shearwater Puffinus yelkouan is a Mediterranean breeding endemic, known to migrate into the Black Sea.  The species’ breeding sites are considered to be only partly known with most of the known breeding population falling within France, Italy and Malta in the central Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean Science Commission (CIESM) has launched an initiative requesting (to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) documented evidence (such as overlooked scientific publications in any language as well as Ph.D. theses) of Yelkouan Shearwater breeding sites in any of the regions signalled by a question mark on the interactive map, notably along the African coastline and in the Black Sea.

A free admission is offered in return for new information to the 42nd CIESM Congress to be held in October next year in Cascais, Portugal, where a session on top predators, including seabirds, will be hosted (click here for a list of the 75 session themes).  The Commission is based in Monaco and currently has 23 member states. Its President is H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco.

The map includes a list of references to breeding records for the Yelkouan Shearwater.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 01 October 2018

Bryce Robinson (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Migratory Bird Management, Anchorage, Alaska, USA) and colleagues have published open access in the journal Marine Ornithology on four Short-tailed Shearwaters Ardenna tenuirostris (Least Concern) feeding on a beach-cast salmon in Alaska.

Short-tailed Shearwaters feeding on a beach-cast salmon, August 2017; photograph by Gerrit Vyn

The paper’s abstract follows:

“We report the first documentation of off-water foraging by the Fork-tailed Storm-Petrel Oceanodroma furcata and Short-tailed Shearwater Ardenna tenuirostris, a behavior not previously documented in any member of the families Hydrobatidae or Procellariidae. Over a two-week period in September 2016, we regularly observed individuals of these species over land on an extensive intertidal zone on the Bristol Bay coast of the Alaska Peninsula. We documented irregular feeding behaviors by storm-petrels including pattering over shallow water and sand, digging into sand to uncover food items, and feeding on beach-cast fish. We revisited the site in August 2017 and did not observe storm-petrels, but we observed four shearwaters feeding on a beach-cast fish. The aberrant feeding behaviors, paucity of stomach contents and emaciated body condition of salvaged and collected birds, together with patterns between bird occurrence and wind speed and direction, indicate to us that these birds were blown to shore while weakened by food stress or compromised health. We further suggest that these aberrant feeding behaviors may be related to massive seabird die-offs that occurred in this region during 2014-2016, die-offs in which Fork-tailed Storm-Petrels have heretofore not been reported as a species affected by this phenomenon.”

Short-tailed Shearwater, photograph by Kirk Zufelt

Reference:

Robinson, B.W., Decicco, L.H., Johnson, J.A. & Ruthrauff, D.R. 2018.  Unusual foraging observations associated with seabird die-offs in Alaska.  Marine Ornithology 46: 149-153.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 28 September 2018

Lights have gone on once more this month for American football (gridiron) on Friday nights on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, marking the season’s first games within the globally Endangered Newell’s Shearwater Puffinus newelli fledging season.  However, games throughout October and November will be held on Saturday afternoons instead to avoid fledglings being attracted to and downed by ballpark flood lights.

A fledgling Newell's Shearwater, photograph by Eric Vanderwerf

“Saturday [15 September] marked the beginning of that fledgling season [ends 15 December] , when seabird chicks that have been raised in burrows all around Kauai start making their way toward the ocean, and historically stadium lights have been an obstacle in their paths.  The birds usually use the moon as a guiding light on their journey, but they can fixate on things like stadium lights and circle them until they fall to the ground.

For the past seven years, night football has been a thing of the past, but that changed after the county spent millions retrofitting ballpark lights in county parks.  It was one of the things done to comply with a 2010 Justice Department plea agreement in which the county and Kauai Island Utility Cooperative admitted to violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

In addition to things like retrofitted park lighting, officials used knowledge of breeding cycle timing and the moon phase to decide which night football games could be played without causing harm to the endangered seabirds.  … night games on the last three weekends of September were considered low risk.   Night games in October and November were considered high risk.”

An estimated 75% of breeding Newell's Shearwaters, a species endemc to the Hawaiian Islands, breeds on Kauai.  Between 1999 and2001 it is estimated there has been a 60% decrease in the Kauai popularion.

Read more here and here.

Save our Shearwaters, a programme funded by the KIUC and based out of the Kauai Humane Society, has been rehabilitating and releasing downed seabird fledglings on the island since its creation in 1979. Every year, seabirds downed by lights are collected in the breeding season by residents and visitors and dropped off at 11 aid stations around Kauai.

A rehabilitated Newell's Shearwater gets released

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 27 September 2018