I can't understand anybody who doesn't feel deeply deeply moved by these beautiful beautiful birds,
who really spend so much of their life in the air without beating a wing. It's extraordinary.
I don't think I've ever seen a group of animals so beautiful.
You could see an albatross on a nest and it's so impeccable that if you imagine if there's
a small ant crawling up its breast you think I must brush that off, it's just spoiling the image.
And you just look at these absolutely perfect birds,
just dead and there's nothing you can do. Not for them anymore at least. You know so that it really
it really motivates you to think, you know how, how can we make the fishing safe.
When the small divers hit the water and they probably focus on a particular bait
in front of them and and follow it. But because the line is moving so
fast what they don't realise is that there is a hook behind them.
When that egg hatches it takes quite a long time before the chick fledges and that chick may be at
sea for between five to fifteen years before it will return to the colony and breed again.
So any increase in the population may only be seen between five and fifteen years down the track.
I mainly focused on methods to expedite the sink rate of the baited hooks in the upper reaches of
the water column, and sort of applied that through all the main commercial longline fisheries that
take seabirds in the world. Just worked through them all systematically.
Longline fishery in the CCAMLR convention area, that's the Southern Ocean, is albatross
friendly and has been for a long time and I'd say that's
probably the global best practice. I can't think of a better example.
When you work in trying to change a fishing practice, or any form of primary industry I
suppose, where people are making their living, it ain't easy to make changes.
We know albatrosses don't abide by geopolitical boundaries and they cross
wide ocean basins and so those threats are uneven through the ocean.
And that means that we're not actually seeing huge improvements at the breeding colony just yet.
Decades of conservation and monitoring work here on Macquarie Island by the
Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, the Australian Antarctic Division and DPIPWE,
are paying off. Threatened seabirds have begun to recover here since the vertebrate pests were
eradicated on this World Heritage listed island in 2014. On Macquarie Island we have four species of
albatross and lots of different seabirds, and since the eradication the habitat for
all these species has improved, with the tussocks returning to the slopes and the vegetation growing.
The black-browed albatross that was listed as endangered is now considered to be of
least concern. But these species still face threats because a large part of their life
is lived at sea in places that are really hard to protect.
I hope that we can continue to work together across fisheries management, across
island conservation, and with our climate change strategies, to really create a better world for albatross.