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The Albatross and Petrel Agreement has chosen the theme “Climate Change” to mark the third World Albatross Day, to be celebrated on 19 June 2022. This follows the inaugural theme “Eradicating Island Pests” in 2020 and “Ensuring Albatross-friendly Fisheries” last year.
Translocated Black-footed Albatross chicks await feeding in the James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge, Oahu in 2018; photograph from Pacific Rim Conservation
In support of World Albatross Day and its chosen theme each year ACAP highlights one or more of the 22 albatross species with posters, infographics and artworks in ACAP’s three official languages of English, French and Spanish. The featured species chosen for 2022 are two of the three species of albatrosses that breed in the North Pacific: the Black-footed Phoebastria nigripes and the Laysan P. immutabilis. Both these Near Threatened albatrosses have the majority of their breeding populations on the low-lying atolls of the USA’s North-Western Hawaiian Islands. These atolls – and their breeding seabirds - are all at risk from sea level rise and increases in the number and severity of storms that result in flooding, both considered a consequence of climate change. Storm floods have even caused at least one small sandy islet to disappear into the sea, taking with it breeding sites for several thousand albatross pairs (click here). Elsewhere in the island chain, as on Midway Atoll, storms have caused flooding of albatross nests and loss of chicks close to the shore.
ACAP will work with Lindsay Young of the Hawaii-based environmental NGO, Pacific Rim Conservation, to design infographics to be produced by illustrator Namasri 'Namo' Niumim, for the two albatrosses. Her ‘namographics’ will illustrate the NGO’s ongoing work to create a new albatross colony safe from predicted sea level rise by translocating and hand-rearing chicks on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. ACAP is also pleased to announce it will once more be working with Kitty Harvill of ABUN (Artists & Biologists Unite for Nature) in January and February next year; this time to produce artworks for WAD2022 that depict Black-footed and Laysan Albatrosses. Lastly, ACAP’s WAD poster designer, Michelle Risi, now moving to Aldabra Atoll for two years after an extended stay on Gough Island, will, with the help of a number of excellent photographers, produce a poster series for the two birds that will be freely downloadable next year.
Attacked by mice on Marion: a ‘scalped’ Near threatened Light-mantled Albatross Phoebetria palpebrata, photograph by Peter Ryan
World Albatross Day 2022 will also highlight other effects of climate change on albatrosses. Examples include the warming climate of South Africa’s sub-Antarctic Marion Island, which has caused an increasing population of introduced House Mouse to turn to killing albatross chicks (click here), and recent research in the South Atlantic that suggests warming seas are increasing divorce rates in breeding pairs of Black-browed Albatrosses Thalassarche melanophris. Evidence is also building that climate change impacts on foraging opportunities and distributions of albatrosses, including causing range contractions, which may lead to increased overlap with commercial fisheries and greater risk of being bycaught.
Climate change is impacting the world’s albatrosses in a variety of ways: sea level rise, invasive species, reproductive impacts and range shifts. Scientists are only beginning to understand how these impacts interact with other marine threats, such as from pollution and fisheries, to affect populations. World Albatross Day is a small way to help keep the spotlight on the world's albatrosses and how they may be at risk from climate change..
You can follow these initiatives, and more, in ACAP Latest News and on the ACAP Facebook page up until World Albatross Day on 19 June 2022.
With thanks to members of the ACAP World Albatross Day Group for their valued inputs to deciding a theme for 2022.
John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 20 December 2022