Last month, PSI staff writer Eric Wagner joined hundreds of scientists from 51 countries to talk about the health of the world’s seabirds. Throughout the conference, the climate crisis loomed large but there were signs of hope in the sheer numbers of dedicated scientists working on seabird protection.
By Eric Wagner
Seabirds are declining all over the world. While not the official motto of the 4th World Seabird Conference last September, sometimes it felt like it might as well have been. More than 650 biologists, managers, and advocates from some fifty countries had gathered in Hobart, Australia, to discuss all things seabird: how they move, how to track them, how they interact with various human structures (windmills, powerlines, fishing boats and nets), how climate change is altering their preferred habitats and prey, and, of course, the commensurate effects of all those stressors and pressures on their populations.
The news tended to be grim, although maybe not as grim as it could have been; I had just come from the International Penguin Conference in nearby Cowes, a town on the southern mainland. By the end of that, presenters were actually apologizing for having to share that, once again, they were about to discuss a species whose numbers were in sharp decline.
But if people wanted only to talk about seabirds with stable or increasing populations, the conference would have been much shorter. For my part, I was there to talk about rhinoceros auklets, both in the Salish Sea and off the North American coast. (Rhinoceros auklets, as it happens, are one of those seabirds whose numbers, at least in this part of the world, appear to be somewhat stable.) Specifically, as part of a symposium devoted to alcids, or auks, I was going to discourse on a project I have worked on intermittently for the past couple of years, one that looks at up to three decades’-worth of auklet reproductive and diet metrics at breeding colonies from Lucy Island, near Haida Gwaai , south to Año Nuevo in central California near San Francisco Bay. This latitudinal range encompasses almost the whole of the California Current, plus a southern segment of Alaska Current after it splits from the North Pacific Current.
The challenges of the project range from the administrative to the conceptual. I have diet data from most of the colonies, and data either on how many chicks fledged, or their condition at a particular point during the breeding season. After wrangling the data so it is comparable—even though everyone is looking at the same species, they tend to look at it in slightly different ways—I can see how auklet diets change or don’t change in dynamic ocean spaces, and then analyze whether auklet breeding success or chick condition is tied more closely merely to the amount of food the chicks are fed, or to particular species of forage fish.
So far, the most interesting thing to emerge for me has been the flexibility of the auklet diet: how birds in central California sometimes have diets dominated by northern anchovy, sometimes by Pacific sardine, sometimes by another species of forage fish called Pacific saury. But the dominant species can change, sometimes from year to year. Go north, and the colonies subsist almost entirely on either Pacific sand lance or Pacific herring, with the occasional appearance of salmon. In addition, the condition of the fish seems to respond more to marine conditions the year before than to contemporary marine conditions.
At a conference devoted to seabirds around the globe, in some ways mine feels like a fairly minor project with all of its regional and local contingencies or qualifications — the sorts of things that aren’t necessarily so beloved these days in science, especially with the prevalence of Big Data and a commensurate desire to make some broader statements shorn of local fineries. At the same time, the approach seems to be the state of seabird studies these days: trying to figure out how different species are or are not navigating the climate crisis as it manifests in their lives, with myriad other challenges.
After a few days of this, one has a hard time believing in the possibility of positive outcomes. But then you think about what you have actually been seeing, over and above all the graphs with their slumping trendlines: hundreds of people who have dedicated their lives to seabirds and their welfare. One presenter described a long-running project to develop mitigation measures for powerlines that are killing shearwaters in Hawai’i. Their results show huge promise, and they have formed durable partnerships with area power companies. And, of course, the tools people use to study seabirds now, whether tracking tags or statistical packages, are only getting more sophisticated in the types of data they can both gather and analyze. Everyone likes to be given new and more powerful toys.
So in the end, yes, these may be unpromising times, but that doesn’t mean that they are entirely without promise. Undoubtedly that would be a better motto.