Sometimes, the most inspiring stories in nature come not from the critters themselves, but from the folk who spend their lives doing their darnedest to save them. This is one such story, one that charts more than three decades in the lives of two extraordinary New Zealanders – Kath Walker and Graeme Elliott – in a far-flung outpost of the subantarctic.
And before the shutters of conservation fatigue come down, we’re also talking about the most magnificent avian critter on the planet – the wandering albatross. The numbers say it all: a three-metre wingspan, the tens of thousands of kilometres they fly across the ocean, a lifespan of more than 50 years, if they’re lucky, and the decades of monogamous fidelity to their mate. But here’s where the statistics get bleak – the high number of adult birds taken every year by longline fishing boats in the Pacific, and the 70% population decline since 2005.
Watch these navigators soar above the swells of the Southern Ocean – if there was a measure for gobsmacking magnificence, it would rate 10 out of 10, surely.
Our two species, or subspecies (the jury’s still out on the DNA), are Gibson’s wandering albatross, which nests on Adams Island (the southernmost piece of land in the Auckland Islands archipelago), and the Antipodean wandering albatross, which nests on Antipodes Island, 850km southeast of Bluff. This means that although they can fly to South America and back again, these ocean-navigating seabirds belong to Aotearoa New Zealand, and they comprise more than half of the world’s wandering albatrosses. They’re in such rapid decline they have the honour of having one of the highest global threat classifications, alongside blue whales and snow leopards.
Walker and Elliott have dedicated 32 summers and counting to charting the populations of birds on both islands.
“The Jane Goodall of the seabird world” is how Janice Molloy, of Southern Seabirds Trust, describes Walker. No doubt there’s an equivalent for Elliott.
Walker enthuses passionately, but also pragmatically, about the birds. “They’re just lovely — lovelier than a polar bear. And can tell us so much about the ocean.” Elliott is usually the laconic one, cracking a joke, but can also be blunt: “We care because we care. If anyone comes up with a scientific bullshit reason as to why we should bother about their survival, I don’t believe it, do you? They’re just astonishingly beautiful creatures.”
The story reaches back to 1979, when the pair met at the ecology division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in Nelson. Elliott is well known for his common-sense work on predator control, but he’s also a bit of an aficionado of various land birds. Walker has spent much of her working life searching out our rare (and usually endangered) giant snails, Powelliphanta. She’s just been made an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her work. But with a mutual interest in our subantarctic islands, they first headed south together in 1989.
It might sound vaguely romantic, taking leave from their paid work for a summer sojourn on a remote island. But that’s far from the reality. Just getting to the Antipodes is fraught. Walker suffers gut-churning seasickness, grimacing as she says, “It’s just something I have to prepare myself for, three to four days through the Southern Ocean, there and back every year.”
There is no sheltered anchorage at Antipodes, so often the yacht has to stand off, rolling around in swells until conditions permit a safe landing. Getting ashore can be tricky: “I usually wear a wetsuit,” says Elliott, “but Kath just gets soaked,” negotiating slippery kelp-covered boulders, dodging waves, hanging onto a fixed rope while heaving all the fuel and equipment from dinghy to shore.
Depending on where they can land, getting more than 700kg of equipment up the cliffs to the hut can take many hours, or days, through penguin and fur seal colonies and past elephant seals the size of tractors.
The hut on Antipodes, built in 1978 by the Department of Lands and Survey, provided basic accommodation until 2014, when a landslide upended it. Fortunately, the tiny castaway depot next door (still standing since 1892) was left unscathed, providing just enough space that summer.
That was the year the planning started for the Million Dollar Mouse eradication project on Antipodes. With a large team spending months there in the depths of winter, they not only fixed the hut but added a few comforts, including a diesel stove and hot shower. “It meant bath time – standing naked out in the tussocks in the subantarctic wind with a billy of hot water – was finally a thing of the past,” says Walker.
Roll call
The first job for Elliott and Walker once they have landed is a roll call within the 29ha study area (roughly 3% of the breeding albatrosses on the 2025ha island). “It’s addictive, it’s why we go back every year,” explains Walker, to see which chicks have made it through the year and to urgently, but gently, band each new chick before it fledges. Arriving in mid-December and leaving in mid-February, they witness the courtship, nest building and laying of eggs, but miss any egg hatching (usually around April). By December, the chicks that have survived and thrived are fast losing their fluffy white down, and readying themselves to fly away.
Plunging numbers
Back in the 1990s, the nesting rate averaged 74%, says Walker. “Now, we’re lucky to get 62%.” The success rate depends on whether the parent birds can find enough food, as changes in the ocean environment mean they need to go further afield, or whether they make it back at all. But the number of actual nests is the most startling statistic, reflecting the overall population decline. “We once had 216 nests in the study area; lately it’s been as low as 57.”
Satellite-tracking technology tells the story. Take the young female White-44J (her leg band), for example. Her flight path zigzags north and east of the Kermadecs. Suddenly her zigzag changes to a straight line heading directly north. The start of that line is compared with the data from Global Fishing Watch, which records the position of every large-scale fishing boat on the ocean. In this case, a Taiwanese long-line fishing boat is recorded at just the same time and place her foraging flight stopped. Inquiries lead to the eventual return of this satellite transmitter (they’re expensive) to Elliott and Walker.
Curiously, there are significantly more female albatrosses caught on the longlines than males. The females are much smaller than the male wandering albatross, Walker explains. “While the stronger-winged males feed in the furious winds of the Southern Ocean, the females and smaller juveniles prefer the lighter winds in more northerly latitudes, so are flying and feeding right where those tuna boats are fishing.”
They estimate 700 males and more than 1500 females meet their end this way every year, hence the big sex imbalance on Antipodes.
The dearth of female albatrosses results in a growing number of normally territorial males courting one another instead, sharing nests and forming long-term loving relationships. It’s something no other wandering albatross species has ever done.
There’s the science – Walker and Elliott follow an intensive regime of banding, satellite tagging, weighing, health checks and counting to gauge the population across the whole island. But then there are the relationships. “Well, you can’t approach an albatross without saying ‘hello’,” Elliott begins. “You’ll be walking around in the study area, and a female lands near you, and she hasn’t got a mate. And if someone asks you, ‘How do you know that?’ You go, ‘I don’t know, she just hasn’t.’ You learn to read the body language, you can kinda see what’s going on. But also, they’re monogamous. They’re just like us. Occasionally they’re not monogamous. And they don’t want to tell their partners. You can see all that stuff.”
“They’re huge,” begins Walker. “When their wings are outstretched, they’re half the height but five times the width of an adult human. They’re such gentle creatures on land, completely unafraid of us. That makes them supremely watchable. And the similarities in their emotions and behaviours to humans make it hard not to relate to them as you would to any person. But it also makes it difficult not to feel huge sadness when we see a male standing around waiting patiently for weeks on end, every summer for more than a decade, for its partner to arrive, when we know she’s dead.”
This is very much a labour of love. Despite some conservation funding over several summers, Walker and Elliott have funded most of their expeditions themselves.
Watching an almost 70% decline in population, getting to know individuals who later never return, becomes difficult. And the answer is painfully simple.
Elliott says he would love to see all the fishing boats “disappear” — his actual words are harsher than that — “or comply with the rules they’ve signed up to.”
These rules are known as the “rules of the sea” (already enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea), including three major techniques to mitigate seabird bycatch: setting lines at night, using a tori line (a line of streamers to scare the birds away), and a weighted line to ensure the hooks sink faster.
Elliott says, “Even if they complied with two out of three it would make a huge difference. We suspect they don’t do any of that at all.”
Message for customers
Janice Molloy has been watching the drop in albatross population for the past several years. The Southern Seabirds charitable trust of which she’s convener has the slogan, “Catch fish, not birds”. Molloy works through government agencies to get the message out to fishing industry organisations in New Zealand and overseas. She works diplomatically but doggedly, doing her best to emphasise and encourage the necessary mitigation techniques. Enforcement is almost impossible.
From wharves and processors in Taiwan, China, Vanuatu, Japan, Spain, the list of agencies to contact is long. Molloy is realistic, knowing the most effective strategy is to target the retailers.
The main problem fishery is for tuna, a product otherwise known as albacore. It’s bound for the US market.
“We need to work through the appropriate agencies to encourage the relevant fisheries to use seabird-safe mitigation techniques,” says Molloy.
Walker and Elliott have been trying to publicise the decline of New Zealand wandering albatrosses since the mid-2000s, but it’s only in the past few years that media attention has led to public awareness. They even had the BBC on Antipodes last summer to film a sequence for Frozen Planet II, filming the males courting one another in lieu of finding a female mate.
“We’ve got to get the political energy, business embarrassment, consumer and supply chain stuff to all come together,” Elliott says, “It’s all doable. Life’s got harder for albatross; they have to go further north to find the fish, and more and more fishing boats are coming south. We can’t do much about climate change. So we’re focusing on the bit we can fix.”
NGOs are fast coming on board: WWF and Live Ocean (Peter Burling and Blair Tuke) are major supporters of the work. The recently established New Zealand Nature Fund is organising a fundraising dinner and auction next month, all proceeds going to Molloy’s work, to get the message out to those retailers and on down the line to the fishing boats. Walker and Elliott are bravely stepping on stage to tell the story.
Ask them both if they’re optimistic, and there’s silence. Between the realities of the global fishing industry and warming oceans, it’s not looking good.
After a pause, Elliott says, “This is one of the few conservation stories where we actually know what’s wrong and how it can be fixed. We just have to hope that the fishers do the right thing.”
As he suggests, the survival of this species is much simpler than the theoretical science of biodiversity.
“They’ve evolved over millions of years into the Antipodean albatross. They’re part of the history of the planet, nesting only on the Antipodes. But they’re global birds. Our birds fly all the way across the Pacific Ocean. But because they nest on our islands, we’ve got the responsibility to look after them. We’ve got to find the solution here; it’s not going to happen anywhere else. These are our birds we have to look after.”
This story was originally published in the New Zealand Listener’s 11 February, 2023 edition.
