Notes from the World Seabird Conference

Just before I left for Tasmania, I watched Short-tailed Shearwaters (Ardenna tenuirostris) passing Washington's coast, headed the same direction I was about to go. Around 18 million of these medium-sized seabirds nest in burrows on the islands around Tasmania. And each year after the nesting season draws to a close, they fly north to the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska. By the time summers are in full swing here in Washington, these birds turn and begin making their way south, cruising along the Washington coast as they forage in our productive waters on their way back to the Australian waters.  

Unlike the Short-tailed Shearwaters, I do not travel to Tasmania annually. This trip was for a purpose - the 4th World Seabird Conference was hosted in Hobart this September. These conferences are convened every five years by the World Seabird Union, an international scientific organization made up of about 20 seabird-focused organizations that connect seabird researchers and conservationists across borders. This year, the conference's theme, "Wings of Adaptation: Seabirds in a Changing Climate," centered on how seabirds are responding and adapting to warming oceans, shifting ecosystems, and human pressures. 

Seabirds are the most threatened group of birds on earth. Monitored seabird populations worldwide declined by nearly 70% between 1950 and 2010, a loss of at least 230 million birds in just six decades. These declines aren't caused by any one threat. A single species may contend with invasive predators on its nesting islands or disease moving through its dense colonies. At sea, seabirds compete with fisheries for forage fish and risk being caught as bycatch, while warming oceans are changing the availability of their prey. These pressures don’t stop at national boundaries, and neither can the work of addressing them. 

That work is exactly what made me so excited to attend the World Seabird Conference in September. Aside from learning anything and everything I could during the conference, I co-convened a workshop on new technologies for monitoring seabird colonies with colleagues from the U.S. and U.K. Nine presenters from around the world shared their work, including our own SeeBird effort with Audubon Texas and Rice University, which uses machine learning to detect and count nesting birds in drone imagery. In the second half of the workshop, we guided participants through six discussion questions on what monitoring programs need before adopting machine learning, what they should consider before using it, and how people working in this field can prepare for widespread adoption. Those discussions gave programs from different countries a chance to compare approaches, and together we began setting goals and identifying challenges for making machine learning tools useful and accessible to seabird research and monitoring programs around the globe. The conference also marked the start of a new role for me on the World Seabird Union's Board of Directors. 

As the conference wrapped up, the shearwaters I watched off Washington were starting to arrive at their Tasmanian breeding colonies. Along their route they may have experienced the warmer waters, stronger storms, decreased food availability, or interactions with fishing gear attendees of the World Seabird Conference discussed. The birds that made it will spend the next several months closer to home, raising their chicks before heading north again - and many will pass Washington's coast once more next year. 

The Short-tailed Shearwaters may only briefly visit Washington waters, but they represent how connected seabirds are across oceans and borders. The murrelets, gulls, and auklets that nest on Washington's islands face many of the same pressures discussed in Hobart, from changing prey availability to habitat loss. Understanding how they are responding to these threats, though, depends on consistent monitoring here at home and on collaboration with researchers and managers both here and beyond our state. I am looking forward to bringing what I learned at the conference and the connections I made back to Washington to keep supporting these species here and across the flyway.