Saving Fluffy - a tropicbird who fledged too soon

Recently, my friends at the Bahamas National Trust's Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park emailed me for advice about a young White-tailed Tropicbird that was saved from drowning by a boat captain (Captain Mark). The bird was probably hatched on Hog Cay, a nice tropicbird and shearwater colony at the southern tip of Warderick Wells.

On August 13, 2012, Captain Mark and his crew saved the listless and waterlogged chick from the water, named it "Fluffy," and fed it (squid, canned fish, and other seafood) on their deck for about a week. Before they left the Park, they took the bird to the park headquarters, where the warden continued to feed the hungry chick.

White-tailed Tropicbirds are vulnerable and rare, but they actually do quite well around people as long as you don't have dogs, cats, rats, or other invasive species running loose on the island. The most vulnerable point of a tropicbird's life is that period between when its parents abandon it until the bird teaches itself to find enough food to survive. If it lives through that early childhood, it could live for decades. That extra food and time provided by Captain Mark and the Exuma Park may have given the bird enough energy to survive through the hard times ahead.

While I don't want to encourage amateur bird lovers to begin programmes of rescuing young tropicbirds, this type of one-time opportunity must have been a fantastic experience for the people participating in the charter and for the boat's crew and captain - not to mention how great it was for the bird.

The methodology used - moving a chick to a different site and feeding it until it fledges - is actually quite similar to how seabird conservation experts encourage seabirds to form new populations at safe, protected colonies where they can be monitored.

Thus, the Exuma Park might want to put some artificial nest cavities around the ranger station. This is a good, safe site with no introduced predators, and Dave Lee and David Wingate are developing a low-cost artificial nest. Perhaps we'll install a few at the Park next year? I would not be surprised if our friend Fluffy returns and tries to nest near the park headquarters or at Hog Cay in about 4 or 5 years.

If someone reading this post wants to help stop the decline of tropicbirds, installing ideal, safe nesting sites near active breeding colonies has worked very well in Bermuda and could bring breeding tropicbirds close to your safe (dog- and cat-free) island.

According to the Exuma Park Warden, who fed Fluffy for a few more days,

"The tropic bird flew away on his own a few days after you dropped him off.  I set up a little fort for him under my grill on the deck.  It had bars around three sides and he was pretty happy in there.  He ate a lot and was pretty active stretching his wings.  He'd occasionally wander out and I'd put him back.  Then late one afternoon [~August 22], he walked all the way to the front of the house, did a leap of faith and flew all the way over to the island on the other side of the mooring field.  That was the last I saw of him."

Long Live Fluffy!

A new data entry form for the WICBirds.net Atlas of Seabird Breeding Sites

Today I uploaded a spreadsheet form for people to submit their survey data to the WICBirds.net Atlas. Hopefully, this format will make it easier for people in the Caribbean to submit records of breeding and details about the breeding sites.

Please let me know if you have any comments or questions about the entry form.

A comprehensive monitoring plan for seabirds in the Caribbean

You might say to yourself "What would a planned, coordinated monitoring program for Caribbean Seabirds cost and how would you structure it?" That is the topic of today's post. The goal of an effective monitoring plan is that it can detect a certain level of change (e.g. 25%) within the population. Right now, all we can do is say where the birds are breeding, which is a good improvement over the status prior to the earliest regional review of the entire seabird population (van Halewyn and Norton, 1984). To get to that next level, we need better counts and censuses of the populations.

We know the populations have crashed over the last century based on firsthand accounts of people who lived in the Caribbean region. Islands that were covered in seabirds every spring sit vacant or have small populations now. Are the declines continuing? Our data for most species are not good enough to say. This is important. If they are continuing to decline, we should be undertaking all drastic measures to keep them off the endangered species list. If the decline has stopped, we should still watch them but drastic measures would not be necessary.

With terns, the birds move islands between years. Roseate Terns rarely nest on the same island twice. We need to estimate the populations within wide areas every few years. There is not likely to be a big source of funding for this action, so we need to divide up the work among local volunteers who can do it with little trouble. We need to create an efficient system to gather up the data and collate it into the database that we already have. Perhaps we could simply use the eBird system that has been created. I will work on it and have a report at the meeting in Abaco in July.

I realized I left off two really good sets of data from the Bahamas. One was a sequence of surveys in the 1990's by Bailey Smith and Lorraine Minns, two naturalists who live near Great Exuma and decided with encouragement from other Bahamian naturalists to survey the seabird breeding sites. They recorded data for several years. Their data set is among the most comprehensive for any island group. A second series of surveys were those by Jim Kushlan off his own private boat. He surveyed colonies in the Berry Islands, off Abaco, and around Bimini. His contributions were very important as well. The point of these is that naturalists around the region can make important contributions, but without coordination and comprehensive planning, they are just opportunistic surveys. We cannot get a legitimate estimates of these populations without covering all of the islands regularly.

We now have the database, the knowledge of where most remaining colonies are, and a network of naturalists and biologists who are dedicated to seabirds and could reasonably monitor a subset of colonies at regular intervals. At this point, we need someone to coordinate the effort, a group of dedicated and scientifically literate volunteers who can make legitimate surveys, and the will to conduct the surveys. We may also need some funding, but it will not be exorbitant.

What we need are naturalists near each colony who will agree to regularly count the seabirds. It doesn't have to be done every year, but that wouldn't hurt. Every 5 years would be sufficient. They would need to have some Sherman-style live-capture rat traps, the ability to recognize the birds, and access to a boat. Some flagging and tape measures would be handy. We could cover most islands in the Lesser and Greater Antilles this way. There may be some very remote cays such as those in the remote areas of the Bahamas (The Plana Cays, Cay Sal Bank, Cay Lobos, The Ragged Islands, and Mira-por-vos) that would need some outside help. There are about 800 nesting islands in the entire region. We just need to divide the work and create a portal through which people can enter their data. This is a very attainable goal.

I will put together a workshop for the meeting of SCSCB in Grand Bahama this year. I'll have that portal and people can sign up for their islands.