Marine bird conservation
Seabirds wing their way over all the world's oceans and seas. Nowhere, even in Arctic and Antarctic seas, are they free from conservation problems. Pesticides contaminate Ad�lie Penguins that may never have seen a human; oil pollution occurs regularly on the deserted Patagonian and Namibian coasts of South America and Africa; on the high seas far from land plastic objects are swallowed by petrels and later fed to their chicks on uninhabited islands, where introduced cats and rats savage and kill seabirds in their thousands. In the 1980s, until banned by the UN, "walls of death" drift nets killed tens of thousands of shearwaters in the Pacific Ocean. Disturbance by tourists at breeding colonies is a growing problem on the Antarctic Continent. Clearly action is required if we are to conserve our seabirds into a new millennium. Our world has only one ocean: seas are not separated as are the continents. Seabird conservation issues need therefore to be addressed globally, which led BirdLife International to establish a Seabird Conservation Programme in 1997. Objectives for Phase One of the Programme, to run from July 1997 to March 1999, were defined in February 1997, and later confirmed in December 1998, as:
1. To facilitate existing, and promote new, initiatives to reduce the incidental mortality of seabirds by fisheries, particularly in respect of longlining.
2 To establish a network of BirdLife partners and others to influence global and regional policies affecting seabirds.
3. To examine the practicability of addressing bird conservation issues at a global level, taking seabirds as a model and recognizing the difficulties in regulation and enforcement on international waters. |
