![]() ![]() That dramatically slows recovery efforts, but the research shows that adult birds who’ve lost their chicks returned to the same burrows the following year to try again. Rats, it turned out, killed the most-more than 50 percent of mortalities-usually from entering the birds’ rocky burrows and eating eggs and chicks. The researchers took on the sad task of collecting the dead and examining the wound patterns to determine which type of predator made the kill. “Any chick that’s lost in the population is one that we can’t afford to lose.” “Newell’s shearwaters and Hawaiian petrels have suffered catastrophic declines over the last few decades,” Raine says. That’s quite a blow for each of these endangered species. The first step in controlling predators is quantifying the threat.Īccording to a paper Raine and his colleagues published earlier this year in The Journal of Wildlife Management, introduced predators killed at least 309 endangered seabirds at six monitored breeding colonies between 20. That’s why the Kaua’i Endangered Seabird Recovery Project has spent the past nine years constructing fences and establishing other predator controls-work that is proving essential in giving these native birds a chance. The cats descended from housecats, while pigs escape from agricultural sites and rats descended from stowaways on ships. Like many island endemics, Hawaii’s bird species grew up without mammalian predators, so they’re ill-adapted to the teeth and claws that arrived with human society. There wasn’t a single site that we work in that doesn’t have all these predators, busy eating the birds.” You’re going to find cats and rats and pigs in these areas. “People are always really surprised by this,” Raine says, “but it doesn’t matter how remote the area, or how apparently inhospitable it is to predators like cats. ![]() So, unfortunately, do several species of invasive predators-including feral cats, black rats and feral pigs-that have put these ground-nesting birds, and so many other native Hawaiian species, on the fast track toward extinction. The seabirds-including Newell’s shearwaters ( Puffinus newelli) and Hawaiian petrels ( Pterodroma sandwichensis)-obviously have a much easier time getting up the tops of these mountains. The joys of working in a remote, inaccessible area.” And then it looks like it’s going to be okay but it gets fogged in, or you get up there and then you get stuck. “We keep going and hanging out at the helipad, waiting and watching. “The weather’s not that great,” says Raine, the project coordinator for the Kaua’i Endangered Seabird Recovery Project. Then you need exactly the right weather to fly-and the hope that conditions don’t shift, as they frequently do. It takes a lot of effort and more than a little bit of luck for researchers like André Raine to get to the remote mountaintops of Kauai, where they’re working to save endangered Hawaiian seabirds from extinction.įirst you need a helicopter capable of reaching sites more than 4,600 feet above sea level. ![]()
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