Archived News

BirdLife International's Save the Albatross Campaign established its Albatross Task Force (ATF) in 2005.  Albatross Task Force teams are based in the bycatch 'hotspots' of southern Africa and South America, where albatrosses and petrels come into contact with large and diverse longline and trawl fishing fleets.

The ATF is managed by BirdLife Partner organisations around the world, currently concentrated in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Namibia, South Africa and Uruguay.  In each country task force members go to sea on fishing vessels to advise and instruct in mitigation measures to reduce bycatch mortality of albatrosses and petrels and to collect data and conduct research.  The ATF also works on-shore, running workshops with fishers and fisheries management bodies.

Task force members write regular blogs of their ship-based activities (click here).  Following these stories will help keep site visitors up to date with NGO activities designed to help conserve ACAP-listed species - as shown by the following extract from last month's blog by ATF member John Paterson in Namibia:

"The last two months have been quite hectic.  The work has been great fun and really rewarding capped by a really good sea trip at the end of May.  I continued with the tori [bird-scaring or streamer] line experiments that I have been doing for the last nine months.  This work has proved to be really successful showing fishermen that tori lines are really effective mitigation measures in trawl fisheries in Namibia.  So far we have not had a single seabird/gear interaction while flying tori lines."

Click here for an earlier ACAP news item on the ATF.

See also http://www.birdlife.org/action/science/species/seabirds/index.html and http://www.birdlife.org/seabirds/seabird-news.html. 

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 4 August 2010