‘Bycatch” is becoming a well-known dirty word. In a recent video for UK conservation group Blue Marine Foundation, actor Theo James plays a customer ordering so-called sustainable fish at a restaurant. Stephen Fry, playing a wry waiter, serves the dish but then drops an entire net of bycatch over the table and horrified customer.
The sequence was echoed at last month’s United Nations Oceans Conference in France, footage, including from New Zealand, of bottom trawlers dragging across the ocean floor leaving a wasteland: delicate corals, shellfish, marine mammals and a multitude of non-target species among the oily debris.
But there’s another quota of bycatch that’s missing – seabirds. It’s not just the baited lines of fishing boats that account for the loss of tens of thousands of albatrosses every year, but the cables of deep-sea trawlers catching unsuspecting seabirds on the wing.
Amid the staggering injustice of Gaza, Ukraine and other war zones, it may seem indulgent to talk about seabirds. But Fry, James and, not least, Sir David Attenborough – whose film on bottom trawling, Ocean, was a hot topic at the UN conference – make it permissible.
It’s also timely, as New Zealand’s Fisheries Minister, Shane Jones, seeks changes to our Fisheries Act, including further restricting public access to footage from government-owned onboard cameras, the release of which is already subject to Official Information Act red tape. The prospect of it being publicly released arguably incentivises steps to minimise what Jones calls the “unfortunate” taking of bycatch, be it non-target fish, dolphin, seal or albatross. The proposed law change would remove the ability of the media and lobby groups to request footage under the OIA.
Awesome navigators
Tini Heke/The Snares, a handful of islands halfway to the Auckland Islands in New Zealand’s subantarctic island group, seem as far from this turmoil as it’s possible to get. They rise out of the sea, to quote former NZ Geographic editor Kennedy Warne, “like granite molars”: sheer cliffs supporting verdant tops where it is an Eden for seabirds. The Snares featured in my recent Listener story about skipper and conservationist Steve Kafka, who has ferried marine scientists around the subantarctic for many years.
On that visit, we listened to the roaring dawn chorus of tītī (sooty shearwaters, or muttonbirds) – an estimated 1.75 million pairs of them. They were vocalising before heading to their oceanic supermarket to secure food for their chicks, tucked into burrows in the peat that smothers the islands. We were there to pick up seabird ecologist Paul Sagar and Department of Conservation marine ecologist Hendrik Schultz from two weeks of research fieldwork.
Now, I’ve returned to the Snares with Sagar, 75, to document his work: nearly 50 years of studying another inhabitant of these islands, the very beautiful southern Buller’s albatross.
I’m a sucker for seabirds, particularly the navigators – albatrosses, petrels and shearwaters. I’m in awe of those wings, riding any zephyr or storm-tossed wind over wave, and the phenomenal distance across the ocean the birds navigate, often to opposite north-south latitudes. That they travel these vast distances but return to the same island, same nest and ideally (if she or he hasn’t met their end on a fishing boat) the same mate defies human comprehension of instinct, cognition or intelligence.
They are, of course, magnificent. The southern Buller’s can forage for weeks at a time over thousands of miles, and after breeding migrates to the coasts of Chile and Peru. Slightly smaller than wandering or royal albatrosses, the Buller’s is one of the most beautiful, with a subtle vignette of colour through the plumage on its face.
As I follow Sagar to one of his study colonies from the small historical hut on the main island, it’s a dance of fancy footwork through the dense forests of tree daisy species, Olearia and Brachyglottis. Roots are safe to tread upon; peat is not – because beneath the peat is the network of tītī burrows. Break through and you risk smothering a chick, or destroying the burrow. By the time of year we visit (mid-April), many of the chicks have fledged. But you wince with every footfall through the soft ground, then crouch, checking for a chick and struggling to rebuild what was there.
We meander through colonies and cacophonies of fledgling Snares crested penguins – found only here – with their own distinctive scent (or stink). Over these 340ha of islands and rock stacks there is also an endemic species of snipe, the Snares’ very own fernbird and, not least, the Snares tomtit, looking more like the Chatham Island robin in black plumage with a sheen of indigo than our smaller, mainland tomtit.
They need to start looking at the future of fisheries. They don’t need to continue taking as many fish.
What is extraordinary is that despite a history of sealing gangs occupying the island, successive research expeditions landing through the 1900s, or crayfishing boats tying mooring lines in the one rocky anchorage, no rodents have ever made it ashore, or at least none that could multiply. If they had, most of these endemic species would have long since become extinct.
We finally arrive at one of the study colonies. Accompanying Sagar are scientists Graham Parker, Kalinka Rexer-Huber and DoC research assistant Kate Simister. We split up, Sagar and Parker taking on the lower reaches of the Punui Bay study colony, their colleagues heading further uphill. I follow carefully behind Sagar and Parker – it’s a long way down from the cliff edge to rocks and ocean swells.
And here they are: hundreds of Buller’s albatrosses in the air, a spectacle of black- and-white wings across the sky and an amphitheatre of cliffs. They are also right at our feet, tucked beneath the hebes, sitting Buddha-like on their perfectly constructed nests, most with a dark-eyed, grey bundle of fluff beneath them, or an egg from which you can hear the first faint squeaks. The nests remind you of a pot thrown on a potter’s wheel, rounded and hollowed, yet to be finessed. Sagar wears protective overalls. The chicks can resemble gun turrets, swivelling swiftly and projectile vomiting a marine smoothie in protest at being disturbed. Sagar laughs and tells us no amount of soaking or washing will remove the aroma.
He leaves the handling to Parker, who ducks beneath the hebe and, with one definitive movement, takes a firm hold of a beak and sweeps an adult bird up under his arm. Sagar then checks and notes the number of the metal band on its leg, adding another robust, plastic version – easier to read from afar. They’re checking the bird’s identity, establishing which of the pair has returned to the nest. Once the albatross has been recorded, it receives a slight wash of blue stock marker (it washes away over time) to save it being handled yet again.
Although the scientists attempt to carry out a population count across the entire Snares every 10 years (a few long days on foot), a critical measure is the number of breeding pairs within three defined geographical areas. There are youngsters – or, as Sagar describes them, “the loafers, congregating like teenagers down at the mall” – but the scientists focus on the adult pairs because breeding success is one of the most effective measures of the population.
This is a longitudinal study, carried out over decades, since these birds live a very long time – more than 50 years. Lance Richdale, famous for his work with hoiho/yellow-eyed penguins and northern royal albatrosses at Taiaroa Head, first studied the Buller’s albatross on the Snares in 1948. He’d made his own sturdy leg bands in his garden shed and banded 159 adult breeding birds. Amazingly, in 1993, Sagar identified one of Richdale’s banded birds, a female, still using the same nest site it had occupied in 1948. It would have been more than 50 years old, breeding from age 10 or 12.
Successive studies since 1948, along with scrawls on the walls and in the hut book at the Snares hut, read like a who’s who of seabird research and reveal as much about the characters of the scientists as the hugely valuable data set tells us about the behaviour and population trends of the birds.
Compound interest
Longitudinal studies are what drives Sagar, “because you get so much more relevant data from longitudinal studies. It’s like compound interest on money in the bank.” He first came here as a 26-year-old, spending four months on the island in 1976-77, accompanied by his wife-to-be, freshwater ecologist Joy Woods. The couple returned there in 1983. But it was in the late 1980s that Sagar began hearing about bycatch. Concerned about the Buller’s, he pressured DoC to enable him to return to study the population. In 1992, the longitudinal study began – recording the numbers of breeding pairs of southern Buller’s albatross every year, except for 2018, due to lack of funding, and 2021, due to Covid.
It’s a family affair – Sagar was assisted in the past by daughter Rachael Sagar (highly respected in seabird and subantarctic research) and younger son David, who both now work for DoC. Sagar senior worked for the old Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, then Niwa (the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research), but many of his trips south have been in his own time, unpaid. Every trip has required him to scratch for funding. “Even if we weren’t getting paid, we still needed a boat to get down there.” Now retired, he continues regardless. He is a gentle man, hardly someone you’d think would battle the powers that be. “Actually, I tend to be quite stubborn. If I really believe in something, I’ll dig in and keep at it.”
Fortunately, DoC’s marine bycatch and threats team now has a dedicated conservation services programme to monitor protected species bycatch, and funding is assured for at least a few years. The cost of monitoring the Buller’s population and many other seabirds is part-covered by levies on the commercial fishing industry, with the government meeting the rest.
Therein lies the rub. The decline in population first hit in 2004-05, mirrored by that of the Antipodean wandering albatross and almost every other albatross species.
The southern Buller’s can forage for weeks at a time over thousands of miles.
“One of the two suspects in that decline is the perennial one of fisheries bycatch,” says Sagar. “The other is warming oceans: climate change.” The latter means lower ocean productivity, he explains: not enough food for the birds. This in turn may lead to an increase in bycatch.
“My impression is that the birds used to feed more around coastal New Zealand and into the Tasman during the incubation period, but now, just about all the ones we’re tracking are heading further across to Tasmania and feeding close inshore. If they’re not finding enough food close to home, they have to fly further, which may put them into waters where there’s more risk of bycatch.”
After slowly declining since 2006, a dramatic recent drop had reduced the number of southern Buller’s breeding pairs by 36% in 2024, the last time the scientists were here. Food productivity may have been a factor. “If they don’t get enough food, if the females don’t get adequate fat reserves, they don’t breed; they take a sabbatical.”
But fishing bycatch, says Sagar, is still the No 1 culprit. “The birds are still getting nailed by various fisheries. For example, 339 birds were recorded [deceased] in the Japanese longline fishery [which operates in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans] in 2019, and 36 in Chilean trawl fisheries from 2013-16, not to mention those reported in the various Australian and NZ fisheries.”
In our 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone, Fisheries NZ estimates 192 will die each year from surface longlines and their hooks, but astonishingly, more than 21/2 times that number – 512 – will die from trawl fishing encounters. These numbers are based on observer data, so conservative. Sagar says the birds get caught by the cables that connect nets to trawlers, especially during deployment and retrieval. “Where there are fish, there are birds; where there are birds there are fishing vessels. An injured albatross or seabird is a dead one.”
The southern Buller’s albatross wins first prize as the population of seabird most vulnerable to bycatch mortalities in New Zealand waters, and modelling suggests it’s “highly probable” the current death rate is not sustainable for survival of the species. There are now about 14,000 breeding pairs; add in the loss of birds in international fisheries and the future population trend is dire.
Measures not enough
After 33 years watching a population decline – the research published over time is unequivocal – Sagar must feel as if he’s hitting his head against a brick wall. “I do get very, very angry.” He mutters under his breath about a certain fisheries minister, accompanied by a few expletives. “I’m at the stage of life when you can say things you might not say when you were younger for fear of repercussions for your job.”
But his response is still measured, knowing much of the research funding comes from the fishing industry. “I would simply say to the politicians that they need to start looking at the future of fisheries. It’s simple. They don’t need to continue taking as many fish as they currently are, not only because of bycatch, but we’re fishing down populations of fish as well, such as orange roughy.
“The problem of warming oceans and declining productivity is a difficult one to change in the short term. But fishery bycatch – that’s one we can do something about immediately.”
DoC’s marine bycatch and threats team presents and distributes the results of the research. Charitable trust Southern Seabird Solutions campaigns to encourage safe and sustainable fishing practices and Fisheries NZ has introduced mandatory mitigation practices on longline and trawl net fisheries. These include hook-shielding devices and weights on longlines, tori lines (streamers) on lines and above cables on trawl nets, and fishing in the dark.
But still the populations of albatross species decline, in our waters and across the oceans. Of the 22 species, 15 are globally threatened and at least half of all species are in decline. Here, the Antipodean wandering albatross is classified as nationally critical – one step away from extinct.
Sagar will continue regardless; he’s still fit and very able. Why carry on – and why this bird? Like most scientists, he refuses to be led into a discussion about how beautiful this species of megafauna might be, or if he has any affection for them. Instead, he refers to something more practical: “To think, in terms of lifespan, the Buller’s albatross is almost on a par with us. They don’t breed until 10 or 12 and they live to 45 or 50. Quite often now, the people who come down to work with me on the Buller’s, the birds they’re handling are older than they are.”
They may be just one species of many, but Sagar has his own take on the critical importance of any species – comparing the entire gamut of biodiversity to a children’s game. “Picture the game Jenga. It’s a tower built of various pieces. You start taking out a few. To begin with, it’s fine, still standing, but if you start removing more pieces, just like species or eventually ecosystems, it becomes increasingly fragile. And then the whole lot goes and we go with it.” This is a global issue, of course, a discussion as critical in Aotearoa, or on any fishing vessel, as at international conferences in France.
But perhaps the ultimate and most poetic bycatch species to land on a diner’s plate – be they member of the public or fisheries minister – could be the sodden wings and once proud head of an albatross. Perhaps then we might reconsider whether fish even needs to be on the menu.