Saving South Africa’s threatened albatross from lethal fishing lines

On a small boat in the Atlantic, about 27 nautical miles (50km) away from South Africa’s Cape Point, a group of bird watchers are calling out seabird names: “Atlantic Yellow-nosed! Black-browed Albatross!”

The tour boat takes bird watchers from Cape Town to see endangered seabirds, including albatrosses, that are hard to find on the mainland.

It’s a warm summer’s day and the sky is blue and clear, perfect conditions for bird-watching. The skipper is speaking on his radio – he’s looking for fishing trawlers.

He soon finds one, and makes a beeline towards it. The closer the boat – operated by Cape Town Pelagics, a non-profit organisation – gets to the fishing vessels, the more seabirds appear.

As he stops right next to the fishing boat, hundreds of birds trail behind it.

They’ve learned to associate these boats with food. They follow the trawler, waiting for discarded fish heads and guts which fishermen throw into the sea as they sort through and process their catch.

The birds fight over the discarded pieces, occasionally diving into the nets to catch some of the fish there. But looking for food this way can cost these seabirds their lives.

“They get caught on what they call long lines,” explains Tim Appleton, a British conservationist and the founder of the Global Bird Fair, referring to a commercial fishing method that uses long fishing lines dotted with hooks to catch large fish like tuna.

“Some of these long lines that go out the back of fishing boats are 100 kilometres (62 miles) long. They have 4,000 hooks on them. Every 4,000 hooks are baited with a bit of squid or fish and of course the birds try and get the bait and end up getting caught on the hooks, dragged under and drowned.”

The accidental deaths of animals by fishing boats are called bycatch. And it’s not just long-line fishing that kills these birds: they also get tangled in the cable lines that pull the fishing nets up towards the boat.

Albatrosses spend almost half of their life on the high seas, making them particularly vulnerable to being injured or killed by fishing boats.

“Of all of the groups of birds in the world, the seabirds are one of the most endangered,” says Andrea Angel.

She works for BirdLife South Africa, a conservation organisation, where she leads the Albatross Task Force. For the past 20 years it has been working to stop the sea birds from being killed by fishing trawlers.

“There are only 22 species of albatrosses globally, 15 of those are threatened by fishing activity. Albatrosses roam the seas and live exclusively on squid, fish and things that they catch in the ocean. So most of their lives are spent at sea, which means that they encounter fishing vessels more than any other bird.”

She adds that albatrosses’ mating habits also make them more prone to extinction. They mate for life and only lay one egg every two years which they raise on breeding islands. The parents share responsibility for feeding their chick.

“There’s a huge investment in raising that chick, and that investment is made by both of the parents. So when one of them is out following fishing vessels, if one of those parents is injured or dies, the chick back on the island will also die, because the one parent isn’t enough to keep up feeding this one chick, and an investment that’s taken them two years to lay an egg is completely lost.”

What’s worse is that, because albatrosses are monogamous and pair for life, it takes them up to four years to bond with a partner.

“Once that bond breaks through the death of one of the partners, it will take them at least another four or five years to form another bond and begin the ritual of laying eggs again. So the disruption of one bird being lost at sea is tremendous.”

One way to prevent the accidental death of albatrosses at sea is the use of bird scaring lines: they’re essentially nautical scarecrows, scaring the birds away from the nets and fishing lines.

Colourful plastic streamers hang above the fishing nets and fishing lines, fluttering in the wind to stop birds from getting caught in them. Made of plastic tubing and rope, they can be cheaply and easily made.

BirdLife has been collaborating with disabled workers from the Ocean View Assocication for Persons with Disabilities, training them to make the bird scarring lines.

“Ocean View started off as a fishing community,” says Deborah Gonsalves, the manager of the association, which provides a daycare workshop for people with physical and intellectual disabilities.

“Some of our members were fishermen prior to having a disability. So to see BirdLife partnering with them has been amazing and the members have grown tremendously.”

She says building bird scarring lines has been an incentive for the members of the association.

“It’s actually enabled them to still be productive and it gives them that self-worth. At the moment, as I’m sure in most parts of the world, there is a lack of funding. The economy has taken a knock. The work they do here supplements their disability grant and it gives their loved ones the chance to work while they are being cared for.”

But Andrea Angel says it’s not just the workers and the conservation work that benefits from the deployment of bird-scaring lines on fishing vessels, there are economic incentives for fisheries too.

“We call them bird scaring lines because it’s a very evocative name. It tells exactly what they do. But originally they were called Tori lines. Tori means bird in Japanese. They were created by a Japanese fisherman in the late 90s, who was tired of catching so many birds in his hooks and losing his catch. Fishermen would rather catch a big tuna than a bird. A tuna is worth around $10,000 (£7,400) and a bird is worth nothing. So the economic incentive for them is huge.”

But she admits that some fishermen faced with time constraints, safety concerns and fishing quotas, don’t always use the lines.

“They don’t always put out the bird scaring lines for various reasons. And so it’s always a negotiation and a reminder to them to please do so, because they really are saving tens of thousands of bird lives.”

Since the Albatross Task force was set up in 2004, it’s seen a 90% reduction in the number of the seabirds killed by southern African fisheries. The hope is to replicate its success in other parts of the world to ensure these majestic birds can keep reproducing for years to come.