From Alderney Wildlife Trust

Following action by The Wildlife Trusts, RSPB and RSPCA the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) decided to reclassify Polyisobutelene (PIB), under the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL), making it illegal to discharge any amount into the sea.

The IMO is stopping ships from discharging PIB at sea after birds covered in the sticky substance were washed up on the Channel coastline. Over 4,000 seabirds washed ashore, dead or dying between February and May, after there were two separate spills. The substance which has been likened to PVA glue in consistency, coats the birds feathers, rendering them unable to fly or maintain core body temperature.

The tragedy, the largest marine pollution incident of its kind in the region since Torrey Canyon, shocked thousands of people. At a meeting of the IMO’s working group on the Evaluation of Safety and Pollution Hazards of Chemicals (ESPH), it was decided to change the classification of high viscosity PIBs and prohibit any discharge at sea from 2014. This will also apply to new “highly-reactive” forms of PIB, which are currently being transported un-assessed.

The recommendation to do this had been made by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) on behalf of the UK Government, following vigorous campaigning by wildlife charities and the public.

This was a decision which was expected to take years and the efforts of all those who lobbied so hard in the Channel Islands should not be forgotten.

Thanks go out to GSPCA, JSPCA, Durrell,  La Société Guernesiaise,  La Société Jersiaise and the National Trust for Jersey who joined the AWT campaign and all of their Facebook and Twitter followers! The Birds On The Edge report can be read here.

Today’s decision is a real step forward, safeguarding our seas and sealife for future generations.

From BirdLife International

It is becoming increasingly obvious that our already declining bird populations, threatened by widescale habitat and climate changes, are put under further pressure through the actions of humans. Scientists with Environment Canada have found that human-related activities destroy roughly 269 million birds and 2 million bird nests in Canada each year. Most human-related bird deaths (about 99%) are caused by impacts of feral and pet cats, and collisions with buildings, vehicles, and electricity transmission and distribution lines.

Over the last four years, 20 Canadian scientists conducted extensive analyses that enabled them to release the first-ever estimates of annual direct bird mortality from human-related sources. The results have just been published in a special issue of Avian Conservation and Ecology.

“Because birds are excellent indicators of biodiversity, the newly-released articles from Environment Canada highlight areas where broader biodiversity may be impacted”, said Dr George Finney, President of Bird Studies Canada. “These results provide a crucial first step toward understanding the relative importance of bird mortality factors, and will inform future research directions, conservation actions, and policy decisions.”

Cats appear to kill as many birds as all other sources combined. Feral and pet cats are believed to kill more than 100 million birds per year in Canada. An estimated 60% of those are killed by feral cats. Bird species that nest or feed on or near the ground are especially vulnerable to cat predation.

“We are deeply troubled by the disquieting research published today on the number of birds killed every year in Canada due to human-related activities”, said Ian Davidson, Executive Director of Nature Canada. “Fortunately, there are concrete and sensible ways that people and governments can prevent the needless death of birds, especially now during the migratory season.”

Collisions with electricity transmission and distribution lines have been identified as the second-largest human-caused source of bird mortality in Canada. Between 10-41 million birds per year are killed by collisions with transmission lines; between 160,000 and 800,000 birds are electrocuted by distribution lines; and about 400,000 nests are destroyed annually due to vegetation clearing under powerlines.

Collisions with residential and commercial buildings are the third-highest of the human-related sectors, killing an estimated 16-42 million birds each year – mostly at houses. Following bird-friendly building guidelines can help individuals and building managers reduce the risk to birds. Using commercial products, special glass, or homemade solutions to make windows more visible to birds can reduce daytime collisions. Night-time window collisions can be reduced by leaving lights off in low-rise and high-rise buildings.

An estimated 13.8 million birds are killed annually by colliding with vehicles on Canada’s primary and secondary roads.

There are about 10 billion birds in Canada. The estimated total of 269 million bird deaths per year caused by human-related factors constitutes less than 5% of the overall population. Bird deaths from other causes (such as natural predation, disease, severe weather, or habitat loss) are not reflected in the estimates.

Whilst Canada is undoubtedly a very large country we can still see that the Channel Islands will contribute annually to the global, and un-estimated, man-made, and avoidable, toll of wild birds. We are increasingly beginning to realise how important our islands are too for migratory birds just passing through. How many each year fail to reach their destination through some man-made structure in their path that they don’t see? Or from the house cats and feral cats that are found everywhere in Jersey except on our offshore reefs – and even there birds aren’t safe from man-made problems! And, when thinking of feral cats, is it any wonder why we have so few lizards in some places!

From ABC News

TV and radio towers, blamed for nearly 7 million bird deaths each year in North America are doing the most damage to species that can hardly afford the loss, according to a new study published in Biological Conservation.

In the United States and Canada, at least 97% of the birds that crash into the towers, or the guy wires that hold them up, are the tiny songbirds – mostly warblers – that are considered “birds of conservation concern”.

The latest study comes from the same researchers, members of the Los Angeles-based Urban Wildlands Group, that warned last year of the spiralling mortality of birds that are attracted to the lights, usually red, atop the towers. The lights are required by the USA’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for any tower over 200 feet tall, and there are thousands in North America that are more than 10 times that height.

The deaths usually occur during the nocturnal migration of songbirds, especially when the cloud ceiling is low and there is fog or rain. The lights create an illuminated area around the tower and it is thought the birds become confused, switch off their night navigation and begin to spiral around the tower. Some run into the support cables, or into each other, and plunge to the ground.

Travis Longcore, from the University of Southern California and lead author of the current study, said his group wanted to look beyond the sheer numbers and focus on which types of birds were suffering the greatest loses, based chiefly on the number of deaths compared to the overall population estimate of each species.

“Many bird species are killed at towers disproportionate to their abundance,” the study says.

“This lets us look at this (the tower deaths) as a factor in the trajectory of the population”. The study indicates that towers are a very significant factor for a number of species, especially small songbirds, some of which are declining in numbers overall.  The researchers found that 58% of the birds killed each year are warblers, including Swainson’s warbler Limnothlypis swainsonii, which loses 8.9% of its population each year, and the black-throated blue warbler Dendroica caerulescens loses 5.6%. It’s not just songbirds though, each year yellow rail Coturnicops noveboracensis loses about 9% of its total population because of communications towers, many of which are taller than the Empire State Building.

In addition to communications towers, however, the birds have to fend off cats and other predators, and many are killed when they crash into windows, as urban dwellers know so well. So towers are only part of the problem, but this study suggests they may be more significant than had been thought, at least for certain species.

A solution?

Some recent experiments have shown that a flashing (blinking) light attracts fewer birds than a light that remains on. The FAA recently ruled that tower operators may switch to blinking lights, and some have done so. It could be too that when a steady light is replaced by a blinking light, the birds simply leave. This is not an expensive modification but the results may be immediate.

This research is, of course, based on estimates, some of which wildly disagree with estimates from other researchers, and that may be partly because the situation varies so dramatically across the country. And just simply collecting the data is difficult. Longcore pointed out that a dead bird doesn’t hang around very long.

“Scavengers and predators and decomposers are incredibly effective,” he said. In one case an owl was spotted as it zipped through the night sky and grabbed small birds before they even hit the ground.

However, sometimes it’s easier to find how many birds have died. Scientists found that an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 birds, mostly Lapland Longspurs, were killed on Jan. 22, 1998, near a 420-foot tower in western Kansas. It happened, as is often the case, during a heavy snowstorm. See bibliography of bird kills in USA here

And the number of kills from towers still lags far behind the estimated number of deaths caused by birds hitting windows. And still, the estimates vary widely. One group of researchers, for example, estimated that the number of window-kills was somewhere between 97.6 million to 976 million annually.

Longcore said he believes that if most towers are modified, just by switching to flashing lights, many more songbirds will be around to serenade us in our gardens.

The situation with tall masts in the Channel Islands is unclear. However, there are such things such as those on the north coast of Jersey and this may be an area for future research.