Birders’ special gift to the albatross
TEN years ago, BirdLife South Africa struggled to get 100 people to attend annual general meetings. Begging e-mails were sent to members, please come to the AGM. This year nearly 2 000 people will flock to the event.
Plus they will pay for the privilege. And it will be on a ship, far out to sea.
The world will see the most birders ever on a cruise, as they head south from Cape Town next week to one of the prime seabirding areas in the world.
Mark Anderson, chief executive officer of BLSA, has had to plead with birders not to attend this year’s AGM. The ship’s auditorium can only accommodate about 550 of the thousands of birders aboard, but will squeeze in 1000.
What caused this remarkable turnaround? One probable reason is South Africa’s success in stopping Albatrosses drowning and dying in commercial fisheries. It is an extraordinary story, a massive success tale about which all South Africans should be proud.
Another contributing factor was that BLSA changed the name of the AGM to “Flock” after realising few people like AGMs, but many would come to a Flock of birders.
Birders are different from Twitchers. Rather like lawyers are different from judges or advocates or attorneys. All twitchers are birders, but not all birders are twitchers.
So aboard the MSC Sinfonia when she leaves Cape Town heading south on Monday will be a collection of ornithologists, academics, tour guides, administrators, sailors, experts in various fields and, well, twitchers, who are probably in the majority.
Twitchers, broadly speaking, are people who tick the birds they see, keep a list, keep a count for a day or a trip or a year or a lifetime, or all of the above. The lifetime list is considered really important in this social circle. Anything above 500 birds is considered quite good – on the twitchers’ Southern African lists, that is, which is out of a possible 848 973 species.
Pelagic birds are those that never come ashore. So seagulls, for instance, are not pelagic because they generally live on the shoreline. In fact there is no such bird as a seagull, they are gulls of varied species.
Albatrosses are definitely pelagic. A third of all seabirds live off the South African coast, about 100 species, 14 of which breed on our islands, seven of them endemic.
Most remarkable of them all are the albatrosses. They have a 60-day incubation, a full nine months before fledging, two months wing training, then chicks fly off the cliff for their first flight and only arrive back on land seven years later. Yep, you read it right. Having flown about four times around the planet, they return seven years later to within 5 meters of where they were born.
Stand up. Open your arms wide. No matter how tall you are, albatrosses have a wingspan twice that of your extended arms. Up to 3.5m. And they don’t flap those wings often, perhaps once in 100km.
They are tube-nosed, with the largest proportion of their brain dedicated to smell, and can smell a rotting squid several hundred kilometres away. Almost unbelievable.
One Albatross did a 10 000km round trip to feed its chick a piece of squid.
But we still don’t know much, having learned virtually everything in the past 15 years after the invention of satellite tracking. Before that we were really ignorant. We have about 16 albatross species off our coast, the Wandering Albatross being the big daddy of them all, weighing 7 to 11kg with a wingspan of 2.8 to 3.6m.
In 2003, South African fishing trawlers were responsible for killing about 6000 birds a year. They fly into the cables, are pulled under the water, and die a horrible death. Last year the number was less than 100.
In the tuna fishery, seabirds see the longlines with thousands of baited hooks coming off the trawlers, grab the bait, and then get drowned as the hook pulls them under.
BirdLife South Africa decided to do something about this. So behind each boat streamers were attached, trawlers were asked to set bait at night, deck lighting was minimised, dead squid’s natural bladders blow up as they decompose so every squid was pierced to puncture the bladder so it would sink, weights were attached to lines.
The fishermen were not all easy to persuade – they are a tough bunch – but with persistence and dedication and some charming women who went aboard vessels for a week at a time, the fishermen came to realise catching birds instead of fish was not in their interests. They now register every bird bycatch, and it is a requirement in our law.
So successful has South Africa been in cutting the bird bycatch by 94% that it was awarded $1.5 million to persuade other countries’ fishing fleets to do the same. Under our tutelage, South Korea has now achieved similar numbers and Taiwan will soon follow.
Bragging is not a nice thing, but this is something South Africans should brag about, it is a wonderful global conservation success achieved by hard-working, innovative people at BirdLife South Africa.