THE SEX ISSUE
WE’RE OFF TO NEW
IRELAND, PAPUA
NEW GUINEA,
IN SEARCH OF THE
WORLD’S LEAST-
STUDIED SEABIRD:
BECK’S PETREL
PETREL
PATROL
Spotlights and recorded
bird calls are used at night to
try to capture Beck’s Petrel.
Photo André Raine
2
T
Some bird species are so elusive we don’t even know where they breed – and if we don’t know
what dangers they face at their breeding grounds, we don’t know how to save them.
However, an intrepid BirdLife team has made waves in their bid to understand Beck’s Petrel
Bill Morris
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BIRDLIFE • JUNE 2017
he anchor-chain rattle reverberates
through the hull as PNG Explorer noses
out of the harbour and onto the roll of the mid-
night sea. Daybreak finds a BirdLife International
research team – Karen Baird, Matt Rayner, Chris
Gaskin and Bill Morris from New Zealand, Jez
Bird from the UK, André Raine from Hawaii and
two local conservationists, July Kuri and Bernard
Maul – scanning the waves for life.
We’re headed south along the coast of New
Ireland, the second largest island in Papua
New Guinea’s Bismarck Archipelago, in search
of one of the world’s least-studied seabirds.
This bird eluded biologists for nearly seventy
years: Beck’s Petrel Pseudobulweria becki was
first described in 1928, but for the rest of the
JUNE 2017 • BIRDLIFE
NET-GUNS
DURING THE DAY,
SPOTLIGHTS AND
BIRD CALLS AT
NIGHT: THESE ARE
OUR ONLY TOOLS
twentieth century was known to science only
from museum specimens.
Then in 2007, it was sighted off the southern
end of New Ireland. Since then, scientists have
been on a quest to locate their breeding grounds
– an essential step in understanding their biol-
ogy and also in determining the threats they face
on land. Introduced predators like pigs, cats and
rats are all too commonly culprits in the decline
of petrels and other seabirds.
The hope is to track this Critically Endangered
bird to its breeding grounds using remote satel-
lite tracking technology. That, of course, means
catching them to attach a transmitter – no easy
feat given their flighty nature.
In 2012 BirdLife International took up the chal-
lenge and Jez Bird travelled to the area, where
he saw good numbers of the birds rafting on
the waters of the bay. Joining with the Critical
Ecosystem Partnership Fund and other partners,
a follow-up trip in 2016 also found many birds.
However, despite ten days of trying to capture
one of these agile, sea-faring birds, the crew’s
efforts came to nothing. On two occasions Chris
Gaskin fired at birds flying towards his kayak,
only to have one agonisingly slip under the net
at the crucial second, another to tumble out.
“You could probably hear my swearing from the
shore“, says Gaskin. But despite the misses, the
team remained confident the net gun approach
would ultimately work and so, armed with the
knowledge of those previous trips, they returned
in 2017 for another shot.
After two days at sea, the team arrived in Silur
Bay, the Hans Meyer Range launching over
2,000 m above us. It’s on the summits of this
densely forested, vast and barely explored land-
scape that the team suspected the petrels could
be breeding. This area is not connected to the
rest of the world by road, airport or electricity,
and people here live largely off the land, much
as they have for 30,000 years – in pandanas,
thatched huts in neat little villages amidst the
backdrop chatter of the forest.
There are two prongs to the catching effort –
a sea-based technique involving kayaks, chum
slicks and homemade net-guns; and an onshore
strategy. Led by André Raine, this uses power-
ful spotlights and recorded bird calls to draw
the birds down at night, a technique success-
fully used elsewhere with other petrel species.
As night falls, the beach children hang by the fire
watching the strange spectacle. The recorded
bird calls are those of the closely-related Tahiti
Petrel Pseudobulweria rostrata, played on a loop
as spotlights probe the night for birds. But most
nights, there were none, leaving the team to sit
and watch the Milky Way arching over the trop-
ics until dawn fills the sky.
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