Sharing the Secrets of Seabird Restoration

Seabirds dare to be totally different. They don’t sing. They don’t stroll very nicely. And their most well-liked type of replica is forming big, dense breeding colonies near the ocean. This final trait places their metaphorical and literal eggs in a number of giant baskets, which has made them weak to exploitation over the course of human historical past. Market searching, egg gathering, and different types of useful resource extraction have been notably devastating to seabirds. Immediately, the added threats of overfishing, air pollution, and local weather change are pushing many species to the sting of extinction.

Over the past 52 years, Audubon’s Seabird Institute, primarily based in Maine, has pioneered methods to encourage seabirds like puffins, terns, storm-petrels, and extra, to recolonize historic nesting islands. Lots of their strategies revolve across the thought of social attraction, which regularly entails utilizing decoys, mirrors, and playback of seabird recordings to trick birds into considering that an deserted colony is a well-liked place. Misleading? Possibly, but additionally very efficient. With the strategies they developed, the Seabird Institute has restored all the suite of nesting seabird species that occurred in Maine previous to European colonization, reversing island- and state-wide extirpations that occurred a long time and centuries earlier.

As a result of most seabird species share breeding traits, the Seabird Institute’s strategies have the potential to profit chook species in different areas of the globe. However till just lately there was no systemic solution to disseminate this data to seabird managers around the globe. To treatment this, the institute established the Josephine Daneman Herz International Seabird Fellowship, also called the Herz Fellowship.

Josephine Daneman Herz was a conservationist and passionate birder who supplied the unique funding to begin the fellowship. Virtually each summer time since 2009 (besides through the COVID-19 pandemic), the Herz Fellowship has sponsored seabird managers, scientists, and college students from around the globe to come back to the Seabird Institute, help the institute’s fieldwork, and study its strategies. Thirty-five fellows have gone via this system and introduced information again to eleven international locations. Herz’s son, Mike Herz, continues to help the fellowship due to the impacts he sees from it. “I consider the fellowship program is without doubt one of the strongest tales the Seabird Institute and Audubon have to inform,” he says. “It’s not simply hope. There are strategies and procedures which might be tried and true that folks can study.”

These strategies have now benefited round a 3rd of seabird species worldwide, in accordance with Don Lyons, director of conservation science for the Seabird Institute. For instance, 5 former Herz fellows have gone on to work on the conservation of Chinese Crested Terns, a critically endangered species beforehand declared extinct. One fellow, Zhongyong Fan, now leads China’s Zhejiang Museum of Pure Historical past’s efforts to revive the species at its three most essential websites, situated off the coast of the Zhejiang Province and within the Taiwan Straight.

In 2025, fellows attended from Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil. From June via August, they lived on the islands that the Seabird Institute manages and helped monitor, handle, and research the birds breeding there. Within the course of, every of them developed new expertise, relationships, and inspiration to take again to the tasks they work on of their house international locations.

Dominique Espinoza Quirola

Dominique Espinoza Quirola’s seabird summer time kicked off with drama. After touring from Guayaquil, Ecuador, to Bremen, Maine, a storm stored Espinoza trapped onshore, and for 5 days she waited anxiously on the Seabird Institute base camp for her likelihood to get to the seabird islands. When the climate lastly cleared, uneven waters soaked all the things as her boat reached Japanese Egg Rock. Espinoza stumbled ashore and gave a flustered whats up to the Seabird Institute employees who had gathered to greet her. Then she appeared up and seen the hundreds of terns within the sky. This cacophony of seabirds was what she had come for.

The love that led Espinoza to this noisy rock started whereas engaged on her bachelor’s diploma in marine biology. Birds weren’t her focus again then, however she occurred to satisfy birders throughout a course to change into a naturalist information. Quickly she was touring with them to birding subject journeys and conferences throughout Ecuador. A kind of journeys took her onto the Pacific Ocean, the place she noticed seabirds like Waved Albatross and White-faced Storm-Petrels for the primary time. These birds captivated her. “I simply had this sense that I wish to—in some unspecified time in the future in my life—be capable to work with these animals,” says Espinoza.

Two years later, the Herz Fellowship fulfilled that want. Not like most Herz Fellows, Espinoza hadn’t labored with seabirds earlier than, so there was lots to study. Her days sometimes began at 6:00 a.m. with three hours of observing terns and Atlantic Puffins from a blind and concluded with nest checks within the late afternoon. “I keep in mind that on the finish of every day I used to be lifeless. [After dinner] I might go straight to mattress,” she says.

These exhausting days rewarded her proportionately with information. “This venture opened a ton of potentialities for me and I bought to study so many strategies for finding out these animals,” she says. She discovered the best way to seize, band, and place geolocators on terns, puffins, razorbills, and storm-petrels. Studying the totally different dealing with strategies for every species and the best way to decrease their stress was notably helpful to her. For instance, she discovered that when Black Guillemots change into pressured, their toes change into sizzling.

Espinoza sees an enormous want in coastal Ecuador for the abilities she discovered as a Herz Fellow. In accordance with her, the seabirds nesting alongside continental Ecuador obtain a lot much less research than these on the Galapagos Islands. Espinoza hopes to alter that. In the long term, she desires to work with coastal communities to review and preserve seabirds there. Getting a grasp’s diploma in seabird conservation will possible be her subsequent step in the direction of that aim.

Tomás Tamagno

Tomás Tamagno got here to Seabird Institute from the Patagonian coast of Argentina, the place seabird colonies have attracted the eye of overseas exploitation because the 19^th century. Corporations from France, Nice Britain, and the USA slaughtered hundreds of penguins per day to reap fats for lamp oil. In addition they extracted nutrient-rich guano to make fertilizers, destroying nests and full seabird colonies within the course of. Immediately, direct exploitation might have stopped, however different threats stay. Overfishing depletes their meals provides and invasive mammals—rabbits, cats, rats, and armadillos—eat the vegetation that seabirds nest below, eat their eggs, and trigger erosion.

Fundación Rewilding Argentina is a nonprofit that works to reverse these tendencies in Patagonia. As a part of this, they monitor and restore seabird colonies within the Patagonia Azul Provincial Park, which holds colonies for endangered Magellanic Penguins and Olrog’s Gulls, Southern Big Petrels, and Imperial Cormorants. Tamagno helps these monitoring efforts as a subject technician. “Even small threats could be harmful,” he says. “That’s why it’s essential to maintain monitor of the inhabitants of the colonies and to keep away from getting to some extent the place it could be too late to behave to guard them.”

Throughout his fellowship, Tamagno, discovered a number of new monitoring strategies, like weighing and measuring chicks and tagging and banding birds. “All of the expertise that I’ve gained right here will assist me to use these wants in Argentina, which is ideal, as a result of all these strategies are issues we’re searching for to begin implementing in our venture with our personal species, in our personal place,” he says.

Whereas studying particular person strategies is essential to him, understanding the broader administration of the Seabird Institute is much more so. Seeing how scientists on the Seabird Institute run complicated, long-term seabird restoration tasks supplied him with invaluable perception for his long-term conservation targets. The Seabird Institute’s systemic, organized information assortment is without doubt one of the most essential issues he desires to carry again to Patagonia Azul.

The fellowship additionally supplied motivation on a private degree. “It’s very inspiring to see so many individuals so enthusiastic about these birds and these ecosystems,” he says. “I feel that it actually conjures up me to…put all this information and expertise into my very own ecosystem and do my greatest to enhance the conservation of them.”

Rafael Revorêdo

On Brazil’s northeast coast, within the metropolis of Galinhos, Rafael Revorêdo research the distribution of Roseate Terns, a species that breeds within the Caribbean and on the north Atlantic coast of North America. Because the terns depart their roosting colonies every morning, they run the danger of colliding with energy strains within the low mild of daybreak. Revorêdo leads a venture to mitigate the dangers for a nonprofit known as CEMAM. With companions, CEMAM developed an efficient solution to cut back tern collisions by putting in markers on energy strains that make them extra noticeable to terns. Key to their success was utilizing radio telemetry to establish the place the terns most frequently traveled.

Revorêdo desires to duplicate this success throughout Brazil. As a PhD scholar on the Federal College of Rio Grande do Norte, he’s finding out the actions and distribution of Roseate Terns to establish different locations in Brazil the place terns are prone to collide with energy strains and offshore wind farms. By mapping these danger zones, he hopes to mitigate threats proactively.

Doing this requires capturing terns, placing telemetry tags on them, and utilizing radio telemetry to trace them. Revorêdo got here to the Seabird Institute desirous to study these strategies. As a Herz Fellow—first in 2024 and once more in 2025—Revorêdo discovered the best way to seize, tag, and analyze telemetry information for Roseate Terns, storm-petrels, Razorbills, and Atlantic Puffins. “Coming right here and being a fellow on this program let me enhance all these skills,” he says. By means of ample, hands-on expertise, he is now capable of tag terns independently.

One unbelievable expertise throughout his fellowship captured the significance of fostering ties and knowledge-sharing between far-flung analysis tasks. Final February, Revorêdo was a part of a collaborative effort between the Seabird Institute and CEMAM to band and place geolocator tags on Roseate Terns in Brazil. When he returned to Maine final summer time, he recaptured a kind of terns. “This was a huge factor. It was unbelievable,” says Revorêdo. The tern’s telemetry tag contained the primary high-resolution GPS monitor of the entire migration of a Roseate Tern within the Maine inhabitants, he says. That monitor confirmed the chook crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Puerto Rico to Maine. It additionally confirmed the chook flying via an space that has been leased by an offshore wind farm. He notes that these discoveries solely occurred by working collectively throughout the hemisphere.

These expertise will assist his work not solely in Brazil, but additionally in collaborations throughout the Western Hemisphere. At the moment, he’s serving to create a Roseate Tern analysis community throughout the Americas. When he returns to Brazil, Revorêdo will probably be chargeable for recapturing seabirds tagged in northeast North America, downloading their location information, and sharing them with this community to enhance conservation throughout their vary. “We’re positively being linked by the birds and by the analysis,” he says.