The Ninth Meeting of ACAP's Advisory Committee started yesterday in the Hotel Club La Serena, La Serena, Chile.  The meeting was opened with welcoming speeches from Carlos Montenegro Silva, María Angela Barbieri and Javier Chavez of Chile.

From left: Carlos Montenegro Silva (Chile), Mark Tasker (Advisory Committee Acting Chair), María Angela Barbieri (Chile) and and Javier Chavez (Chile) at the opening ceremony

Mark Tasker (UK) acted as Chair, with Marco Favero attending his first Advisory Committee as the recently appointed Executive Secretary.  The first day proceeded smoothly and by closing the Chair announced with satisfaction that the meeting had moved farther along the week-long agenda than had been expected.

Halfway through the day the opportunity was taken for a group photograph.  In the evening the meeting's Chilean hosts threw a welcome reception and gave delegates and observers a gift of a bottle of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon to take home with them.

Mark Tasker (UK) and Jorge Azocar (Chile) toast each other at the welcome reception

AC9's deliberations will continue today and on Wednesday.  On Thursday the attendees will be taken inland on an excursion and Friday will be devoted to adopting the meeting's report.

Click here to access the meeting's agenda and the several Documents and Information Papers being tabled at AC9.  Note that some of these are password protected.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 10 May 2016

To mark the holding this week of the Ninth Meeting of ACAP’s Advisory Committee in La Serena, Chile, Portuguese-based cartoonist Marc Parchow Figueiredo has produced another specially commissioned cartoon in his Qual Albatroz series.

Back in July 2013 Marc produced an albatross cartoon especially for ACAP Latest News and also then wrote about himself, a story worth repeating here.

“I'm half Portuguese, half German and born in France. I've worked in the UK and I'm a big fan of UK literature and humour.  I got into albatrosses as a child growing up in Germany.  I suppose it must have been a book showing the comparative wingspan of birds.  That must have struck something in me.  I grew up to be very interested in nature and conservation issues, but followed a creative career rather than biology - though the choice was hard.  Later I started my own publishing company in Portugal and was stuck for a name.  I wanted something nonsensical and funny, so out of a whim I chose "Qual Albatroz" (What Albatross) as the name of my firm.  It's a reference to something from the Douglas Adams book The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul and refers to the albatross in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Some time after that I started a project with the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds (SPEA) and the idea was to publish a small book about the albatross. We'd ask Portuguese artists to collaborate and to send in some work about the albatross.  Poetry, comics, text - anything really. The profits from the sale went to the BirdLife Save the Albatross Project. It wasn't much and we only printed 500 books, but it helped the albatross and Portuguese artists.  I myself participated in the book with two or thre comic strips, and they were the first cartoons I drew about the somewhat unusual albatrosses. It was in 2008. Since then I've been continuing to draw them fairly, regularly translating them from Portuguese to English.  My idea with the albatross cartoons was to create an interesting way to get people to care about albatrosses and to want to find out more.

Amidst  all this the funny (and sad) thing is that I've never seen a live albatross. That is still my dream.  Until then I'll just draw them as I imagine them to be.”

With grateful thanks to Marc of Qual Albatroz for continuing to support ACAP - and albatross conservation - with his cartoons.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 09 May 2016

Akiko Shoji (Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, UK) and colleagues have published in the journal Ibis on diving in the Manx Shearwater Puffinus puffinus to “nearly” 55 m.

The paper’s abstract follows:

“The diving capabilities of the Procellariformes [sic] remain the least understood component of avian diving physiology.  Due to their relatively small size, shearwaters may have high oxygen consumption rates during diving relative to their available oxygen stores.  Dive performance in this group should be strongly limited by the trade-off between oxygen consumption and oxygen stores, and shearwaters could be a good model group for testing predictions of dive theory.  Many earlier measurements of shearwater dive behaviour relied on observations from the surface or potentially biased technology, and it is only recently that diving behaviour has been observed using electronic recorders for many of the clades within the family.  The diving behaviour of Manx Shearwaters Puffinus puffinus breeding in Wales, United Kingdom, was studied on a large sample of birds using time-depth-temperature recorders deployed on chick-rearing shearwaters in July and August over three years (2009-2011).  Light availability apparently limited diving as dives only occurred between 04:00 and 19:00 GMT.  All individuals routinely dived deeper than traditionally assumed, to a mean maximum depth of 31 m and occasionally down to nearly 55 m.  We compiled all available data for a comparison of the dive depth across shearwater species.  There was a positive allometric relationship between maximum dive depth and body mass across Puffinus and Ardenna shearwater species, as expected, but only if samples of fewer than two individuals were excluded.  The large intra-specific range in maximum dive depth in our study illustrates that apparent diversity in diving performance across species must be interpreted cautiously.”

Manx Shearwater at sea, photograph by Nathan Fletcher

Reference:

Shoji, A., Dean, B., Kirk, H., Freeman, R., Perrins, C.M. & Guilford, T.C. 2016.  The diving behaviour of the Manx Shearwater Puffinus puffinus.  Ibis doi: 10.1111/ibi.12381.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 08 May 2016

The Albatross and Petrel Agreement has produced a number of conservation guideline documents that are available on its web site (click here).  Subjects covered to date include biosecurity, eradication of introduced vertebrates, translocations of albatrosses and petrels, conducting censuses, and removing hooks from birds brought aboard fishing vessels.

A new conservation guideline document has recently been added to the series, written by Graham Parker and Kalinka Rexer-Huber (Parker Conservation, New Zealand), which advises on designing surveys for burrowing petrels.

The guidelines’ summary follows:

“Robust population estimates are needed for conservation management of burrowing petrel populations. Estimates of population size for burrowing petrels are often obtained by extrapolation of burrow surveys to a population- or island-wide scale. However, extrapolation will also extrapolate bias or error, giving rise to potentially large error bounds reflecting imprecise estimates of population size. This hinders species risk assessment and limits the ability to detect trends in population size over time. We review methods for estimating the breeding population size of burrowing petrels by extrapolation from surveys, focusing in particular on the error associated with population estimates of the larger Procellaria petrels. Sources of error in extrapolation of survey data are divided into five key areas: (1) uncertainty of burrow contents (2) timing, (3) availability bias, (4) burrow detection probability, and (5) observer bias. The review highlights that there is no single-best method for minimising error levels in population estimates. Rather, the most accurate and precise studies are those designed according to the specifics of the study resources, species and site, and we discuss a range of the factors that are important to consider. The timing of burrow occupancy checks can help avoid assumptions about what proportion of breeding birds has not yet laid or has already failed. If sampling sites are not representative, or if some part of a petrel’s burrowing range is not accessible, this availability bias can affect extrapolation. Extrapolation errors occur when the area sampled is not representative of the area that the samples are extrapolated to. Burrow detection rates can also affect the accuracy of extrapolation, so the assumption that every burrow in the sampled area was detected should be checked. To produce an accurate and precise population estimate from burrow counts, it is important to determine burrow contents, and to distinguish between breeding and non-breeding birds in burrows. If a proportion of occupants is missed, further error is introduced to the population estimate, so it can be valuable to check occupant detection probability. Whether planar map area or true surface area is used for extrapolation can be a further source of error. Observers may differ in their ability to detect burrows or burrow contents and this observer bias should be tested for. Several key points are relevant to all studies: the need for a good pilot study to minimise error sources in the main survey; the need for sufficient time to cover enough ground, while including contingency for weather; and the need to document burrowing petrel survey methods in enough depth to be repeatable. For reference, we summarise the key problems associated with extrapolation of burrowing petrel surveys, and the implications if these error sources are not addressed (Table 2).”

ACAP’s Seabird Bycatch and Population and Conservation Status Working Groups that met this month in La Serena, Chile heard of plans for further ACAP Conservation Guidelines, as well as of the updating of existing ones.

Graham Parker surveys Grey Petrels on Campbell Island

Grey Petrel in its burrow on Gough Island, photograph by Kalinka Rexer-Huber 

Reference:

Parker, G. & Rexer-Huber, K. 2016.  Guidelines for designing burrowing petrel surveys to improve population estimate precision.  ACAP Conservation Guidelines Series.  19 pp.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 07 May 2016