Under Carl’s supervision, a young Englishwoman, Kirsty Swinnerton, pitched a tent in the forest and monitored their progress for five years. It soon became obvious that they faced a variety of problems. First, especially at certain times of the year, there was very little appropriate food in the forest, much being eaten by introduced monkeys, rats, and birds. This meant that supplementary food needed to be provided. Second, when the reintroduced pigeons started to breed, several of them were killed by feral cats, necessitating increased predator control. But when these problems had been addressed, the original released population gradually began to increase so that eventually it was possible to establish several other populations. And in 2008, Carl told me, there were nearly four hundred free-living pink pigeons divided among six different populations. “This species is now secure,” he said.
The Echo Parakeet (Psittacula eques echo)
Having attained considerable success with the Mauritius kestrel and pink pigeon, Carl turned his attention to what was then the world’s rarest parrot—the beautiful emerald-green echo parakeet. It is the last of the three or four species of parrots that once lived on Mauritius, and the last of perhaps as many as seven parakeet species once found on the islands of the western Indian Ocean.
In the 1700s and early 1800s, the echo parakeet was very common in Mauritius and Reunion Island in upper- and mid-altitude forests and in the scrublands—the so-called dwarf forest—feeding on fruit and flowers in the upper branches and nesting in holes in the trees. The Reunion population disappeared first, and between the 1870s and the 1900s the population in Mauritius gradually fell. This was due primarily to habitat loss and competition from introduced species. Fortunately in 1974, and as a result of growing awareness, the remaining forest was given almost total protection, and a significant nature reserve was created by linking smaller protected forests. But for a while, it seemed that this move had come too late—the tiny population of echo parakeets was having limited nesting success.
In 1979, when Carl was spending a lot of time in and around the Black River Gorges with his kestrels, he occasionally saw small flocks of the parakeets on the ridges surrounding the gorges. They were, he said, tame and confiding, and because they sometimes fed only a few feet away from him, he got to know them individually. But they were disappearing fast: By the 1980s, there were only eight to twelve known individuals left, of which only three were females—although Carl says it is possible that several birds had been overlooked.
Since these parakeets were island residents, facing similar problems to the birds of New Zealand, Don Merton was invited to help the effort to save them from extinction. Drawing on his considerable experience and working closely with Carl, he devised and helped implement the recovery strategy. First, they initiated a study to get to the bottom of the parakeets’ nesting problems. They found that when the parakeets did breed, the chicks were attacked by nest flies that would in some years kill most if not all of them. This meant that nests had to be treated with insecticides. Another problem was tropicbirds taking over nest sites, so tropicbird-proof entrances had to be installed on suitable nest cavities. Rats also posed a great threat, sometimes eating both eggs and young. After two precious nests were lost to rats, the team stapled rings of smooth PVC plastic around the trunks of each nest tree and placed a bucket of poison nearby. One nest was attacked by a monkey, who grabbed a chick and wounded the mother. The team isolated nest trees by judicious pruning of the canopy so that monkeys could no longer jump in from neighboring trees. Then there were the seasonal food shortages—and so feeding hoppers were introduced (though it was many years before the birds learned to use them). Finally, nest cavities were made more secure and weatherproof.
The biologists found that though females typically laid three or four eggs, usually only one chick fledged. In other words, chicks were dying in almost all nests. Carl and his team decided that if there were more than two chicks in a nest, they would take the “surplus,” leaving the parents with a brood they could raise comfortably. If a pair failed to hatch any eggs, a “surplus” chick was given to them from another nest.
“In such intelligent birds as the echo parakeets,” Carl told me, “it is important for their psychological well-being that they are allowed to rear young. It is also important for the young to be reared in family groups.” This program of manipulation of nests also resulted in many surplus young being taken to the breeding center, where they were raised successfully.
The first three captive-bred birds were returned to the wild in 1997; others soon followed. But there were problems with these hand-reared birds. “Some were just too tame,” Carl told me. “When they saw you in the forest, they would fly down and land on your shoulder.” And they were very naive. Sometimes they landed near a cat or mongoose—and did not live to tell the tale. Carl spent a lot of time with these young birds, pondering their problem. He had been releasing them when they were seventeen weeks old, so he decided to try releasing the next youngsters at about nine to ten weeks—the time when they would normally fledge. The results were dramatic. “These younger birds integrated with the wild birds and learned their survival and social skills.”
Gabriella was one of the first three birds to be released. She mated with a wild male, Zip, and was the first captive-bred female to fledge a chick—Pippin. Gabriella had learned to use a feeding hopper in captivity and Zip, learning from her, became the first wild bird to use one.
In subsequent years, the number of birds taking supplemental food from the hoppers and using nest boxes provided by the team gradually increased, as did the number of breeding pairs. By 2006, it was decided to stop the intensive management of the wild birds, only continuing with the supplementary feeding and provision of nest boxes. In March 2008, I learned that there are about 360 free-living echo parakeets—and the population is still growing.
A Haven for the Future
And so, the echo parakeet represents another species saved—although it will be necessary, said Carl, to continue with supplemental feeding and predator control. Skeptics maintain that a species cannot be deemed secure until it can live on its own, independent of human help. “But,” said Carl firmly, “in an increasingly modified world, we are going to have to look after and manage the wildlife if we want to keep it.” Alas, he is right. In a world so damaged by our human footprint, it is likely that we shall have to remain eternally vigilant to protect threatened and endangered species: They need all the help we can give them. It is the least we can do.
One of the most important projects on Mauritius, along with ongoing predator control, is the restoration of areas of native forest—a program in which the government’s National Parks and Conservation Service now plays a large part. As a result of the successes with the Mauritius kestrel, pink pigeon, and echo parakeet, the prime minister of Mauritius declared the Black River Gorges and surrounding areas Mauritius’s first national park—a haven “for the birds that have been saved to live.”
Short-Tailed Albatross or
Steller’s Albatross
(Phoebastria albatrus)
The story of the short-tailed albatross is inexorably linked with one man, Hiroshi Hasegawa, and his lifelong dedication to a single cause—saving an extraordinarily beautiful and extremely endangered bird from extinction. This bird made its last stand in a remote and almost inaccessible corner of the world—Torishima, an active volcano island that rises in sheer and mostly unscalable cliffs out of the sea, some eleven hundred miles southeast of Tokyo.
I spoke with Hiroshi during my annual visit to Japan in November 2007. I was very excited to meet this extraordinary man. His eyes are bright with love for his work, and for the birds to which he has dedicated his life, and he seems filled with suppressed energy. I longed to go with him to watch the short-tailed albatross—but I must make do with the information he has so generously shared with me.
Growing up in the hilly mountainous area near Fuji, he developed a passion for birding that eventually led to hi
s love for the short-tailed albatross, the largest seabird in the North Pacific. Their long narrow wings, with a span of more than seven feet, enable them to glide effortlessly, low over the ocean, going ashore only during the breeding season between November and March. They are very beautiful; the adult has a white back, golden-yellow plumage on the head, and black-and-white wings. Most distinctive is the bill, which is long and bubblegum pink, tipped with blue.
At one time the short-tailed albatross was common, ranging for miles from Japan to the West Coast of the United States and the Bering Sea and nesting on grassy slopes set among the rocky cliffs of small islands, mostly off Japan. It was their glorious plumage that almost led to their extinction: Between 1897 and 1932, it is estimated that feather hunters clubbed to death at least five million of them on their main breeding grounds on the rugged cliffs of Torishima. By 1900, there were some three hundred feather hunters camped there during the breeding season, and the numbers of short-tailed albatrosses continued to decline. When the hunters heard that the Japanese government, in response to lobbying from ornithologists and conservationists, had agreed to make the island off limits, they organized a final massacre. At the end of the slaughter, no more than fifty individuals remained. And then, in 1939, another volcanic eruption wiped out most of the last nesting sites.
A chick begs its parent for food on Torishima Island. When Hiroshi Hasegawa first set foot on this island in 1977 he found only fifteen struggling chicks among the seventy-one surviving albatrosses—and he knew then that these beautiful birds were on the verge of extinction. (Hiroshi Hasegawa)
At least the few survivors now had legal protection: The Japanese government had listed the short-tailed albatross as a Special National Monument, as well as protecting Torishima Island as a National Monument. But there were very few left to protect—in 1956, an expedition counted only twelve nests. Seventeen years later, British ornithologist Dr. Lance Tickell went to Torishima Island to check on this tiny colony and to band the chicks. On his way back, he stopped to give some lectures in Japan’s Kyoto University. That visit made a deep impression on Hiroshi Hasegawa, then a graduate student majoring in animal ecology. Indeed, it determined his future. If a British ornithologist could get to the remote Torishima Island, in Japanese waters, then surely he, Hiroshi, could somehow get there himself.
He could hardly have set himself a harder task. For one thing, he had no funding. And when he eventually got a place on a fisheries research vessel going to Torishima, the weather was too bad for them to land and he only glimpsed the nesting albatrosses from the ship.
Finally, in 1977, Hiroshi set foot for the first time on Torishima Island. He counted only seventy-one adult and immature birds. Since the short-tailed albatross probably lives to be fifty or sixty years old, some of the adult birds were almost certainly survivors of the 1932 massacre. There were only nineteen chicks among the seventy-one birds—four of them already dead, while the other fifteen died before fledging. Hiroshi knew, then, that these beautiful birds were very, very close to extinction. “I understood,” he told me, “that it was my responsibility, as a Japanese, to bring the species back from the brink.”
For a while, Hiroshi was supported by a fisheries experimental station, but their boat had an annual schedule that was not geared to the breeding season of the albatrosses. He succeeded in getting funding for a few years from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, but the government would not commit to the long-term project that Hiroshi knew was necessary. And so, he told me, he gave up seeking funding from official sources and instead began writing a series of popular articles and children’s books. This brought in sufficient funds to charter boats when he needed them for his albatross work. It was then that he learned “never to copy others’ ideas.” Instead he developed his own vision of a conservation plan.
A Rare Bird and a Rare Man
The journey to the breeding grounds is tough. First comes a long boat ride over the open sea—and there can be horrific storms. Even ashore, all the equipment must be hauled up sheer black volcanic lava, to a height the equivalent of fourteen stories, and then down a four-hundred-foot cliff before arriving at the breeding site. Hiroshi has made this journey two or three times a year for twenty-seven years. All the more remarkable considering that, as he confided to me, he always gets seasick! During the breeding season from early November to late December, Hiroshi counts birds and nests on the island, and observes their behavior. In late March, he returns to put identifying bands on the chicks’ legs. And in June, he sometimes goes back to work on improving the nesting sites, planting grass to stabilize the soil and provide some cover. Gradually, the survival rate of the chicks increased. But in 1987, probably as a result of a fierce typhoon and very heavy rain, there was a massive landslide on Torishima Island, followed by a series of bad mudslides that destroyed some nesting sites. This probably caused increased competition for space with black-footed albatrosses.
Hiroshi realized then that it was desperately important to establish a new nesting colony in another part of the island. He carved life-like decoys (to date he has produced about one hundred), which he placed at the site he had selected. Then, when the adult birds began returning for the breeding season, he played back courtship calls of short-tailed albatross (a method pioneered by Dr. Steve Kress when working with Atlantic puffins). For the first two years, there was no response. Then, for the 1995–1996 breeding season, one pair nested there and successfully reared a chick. No other individuals arrived the next year, nor the one after that, but Hiroshi did not give up. He continued to put out decoys and play calls, year after year, until finally, ten years after the first pair had raised their chick, three more pairs arrived. By the 2006–2007 breeding season, the new colony numbered twenty-four nesting pairs; sixteen chicks were fledged.
Meanwhile the breeding success at the original site gradually improved. In the 1997–1998 season, 129 chicks fledged (67 percent of all those hatched); the following year, 142. And so it went, year after year, until during the 2006–2007 breeding season no less than 231 chicks fledged, and the population of the colony was almost 2,000. One of these is a bird banded by Tickell that Hiroshi has been observing since the start of his study; it successfully reared a chick at the age of thirty-three years.
Threats at Sea
Of course, short-tailed albatrosses—like all the albatross species—face major threats during their months at sea. Many are hooked and drowned on commercial long lines; others get tangled in abandoned fishing gear or swallow plastic debris floating in the ocean. From time to time, they are coated with oil from spills. Hiroshi and other ornithologists tried to raise public awareness. Between 1988 and 1993, a series of TV programs about the plight of the short-tailed albatross was broadcast throughout Japan. In 1993, the short-tailed albatross was listed as endangered in the Japanese Endangered Species Act. And finally, nearly twenty years after beginning his battle to save these birds, Hiroshi was able to secure funding from the Japanese government for both the ongoing habitat improvement at the original breeding site and the establishment of the new breeding site on Torishima Island.
The only other place where short-tailed albatrosses are known to have a nesting colony is on an island located southwest of Torishima. Hiroshi managed to visit this colony in 2001, but because the ownership of these islands is disputed among Japan, China, and Taiwan, it was extremely hard to get access.
A Very Patient Bird
There is also a place within US jurisdiction, the Midway Atoll, where short-tailed albatrosses have attempted to breed—although without success. No more than two individuals have been seen on any one of the atoll’s islands at the same time, only one egg was laid, and there is no record of a hatching! Perhaps these stray short-tailed albatrosses are attracted by the sight or sound of the two million or so black-footed and laysan albatrosses that breed on those islands.
Judy Jacobs, who heads up the US Fish and Wildlife Service recovery plan for the short-tailed albatross,
told me that one of these stray birds, believed to be a male, “has shown up on Midway’s Eastern Island almost every breeding season since 1999.” In 2000, to encourage a mate to join him, a number of decoys were placed on his island, along with a sound system playing recorded calls from Torishima. But despite these attractions, no other short-tailed albatross appeared, and year after year he waited in vain. Then his luck changed. “This year, just two weeks ago,” Judy wrote in January 2008, “he was joined for the first time by another of his kind—a juvenile.” The patient albatross and his new juvenile companion showed preening and pair-bonding behavior. “So perhaps,” said Judy, “the adult bird’s patience of nine years will finally be rewarded!!” I am longing to find out!
A New Island Home
The most important part of the recovery plan drawn up in 2005 by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, in cooperation with Japanese and Australian scientists, was to establish a new breeding colony in a safe place. In 2002, Torishima volcano had erupted again (it is one of the most active in the area), and although on that occasion it just spewed out ash and smoke—at a time when all albatrosses were out at sea—it was a stark reminder of the danger faced by the still-precarious short-tailed albatross population. It was important to try to establish a new colony on an island that was safe from volcanic activity and one that was accessible for monitoring. After much discussion, and a reconnaissance trip by Japanese scientists, Mukojima Island, one of the Ogasawara Islands about two hundred miles south of Torishima, was selected as a site for the new colony. Short-tailed albatrosses had been recorded breeding there as recently as the 1920s.
Hope for Animals and Their World Page 28
