When I was a child, as a family we only ever had two holidays. The first was on the Norfolk Broads and even though I would only have been about seven, I was excited by the sights of the bird life that I saw, especially the Herons and the Egrets that were all new to me. Further, I heard a haunting sound that I now know was the booming sound of a Bitten calling. Something that even now, is a really rare sound, seeing the Bitten is even more rare and I know many experienced birders who have never seen one.
The Second holiday was at Dawlish Warren near the Ex Estuary and by this time I was thirteen and able to appreciate the countryside and environment that was at this location. None of my family shared my love of natural history but fortunately I was able to garner the time to go off on my own and explore the mudflats. It was an amazing experience to just watch the waders and seabirds that I had never seen before.
Some of the birds I knew from books, some I didn’t. One that I had not seen before was a Wandering Albatross. Then I had no idea of just how rare my sighting was, and I had no idea that I could or should have reported seeing this bird. It was only a couple of years later when I became a member of the RSPB did I discover that there had been other unconfirmed reports of this Albatross being seen. Also it should be noted that this was in 1976 when the summer was remarkably hot and dry, and with hindsight, the weather and the unusual sightings were some of the first signs of a changing climate.
This experience prompted me to do two things, the first was to start saving up from doing a paper round for an SLR camera, the second was to start seriously looking at learning what I could about what I saw.
With the Albatross all I really knew was the ancient mariner poem and the bit about water and not a drop to drink. But the memory of seeing this bird with such an enormous wingspan has always stayed with me.
Therefore I was surprised to hear that we are loosing so many of these birds, as I couldn’t imagine what could we be doing to drastically reduce the population. The answer was that in tackling one conservation problem we had inadvertently generated another one.
Long line fishing had been seen as a much more sustainable way of fishing than trawling nets when catching species like Tuna. Frequently dolphins and proposes were also caught in the nets. As an air-breathing Mammal they were being drowned in the nets. Therefore fishermen were persuaded to go back to the traditional long line methods. The difficulty was that after years of trawling, the fishermen had lost the skills.
The older traditional fishermen would weight the hooks so they disappeared quickly so that birds like the albatross couldn’t snatch the bait. Also the older and more experienced fishermen would trail flags or banners from the back of the boat to keep the birds away. However the fishermen who returned to this form of long line fishing with lines of baited hooks some as long as one hundred kilometres, have lost the skills and it is now the albatrosses that were being drowned. Therefore organisations like the RSPB and Bird Life International have to re-educate the fishermen in the old skills.
As the albatross is such a long-lived bird, living to fifty odd years, they only reach sexual maturity at twelve to fourteen years. They also have slow reproductive cycle, laying only one egg per pair and only breeding every two to three years. Any sustainable losses will decimate the population. The fact is that in the last twenty years the population has halved and is decline at one percent per year.
The problem here was not the solution that saved the dolphins and proposes, but the fact that instead of using lines that were three or four miles long, but using lines that were more than ten times the length that were traditionally used.
Personally as Tuna is endangered itself anyway, I don’t buy or eat it. By not eating it we may help save the Albatross.
My thanks go to Lex van Groningen and Bird Life International for the stunning image of the Albatross
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