For the love of seabirds

Edin Whitehead inherited a love of birds from her father and became captivated by the majesty of seabirds on a trip to the Subantarctic Islands. Now a PhD student at the University of Auckland, she is trying to figure out how best to help the birds of the Hauraki Gulf, who are facing many threats, including warming waters.

Many of northern New Zealand's seabirds are out of sight and out of mind for most of us.

They live on the wing, migrating and foraging long distances across the open ocean. When they come to land to breed and rear chicks, they do so in remote coastal areas, or on small, uninhabited islands in Tīkapa Moana, the Hauraki Gulf. But these seabirds are under pressure.

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"They're the most threatened group of birds in the world," says Edin Whitehead, PhD student at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland. "They face threats at sea and on land, it's a double whammy."

Climate change, mammalian predators, plastic pollution, oil spills, fisheries bycatch, diseases, light pollution - the list goes on. Whitehead investigated them all for a 2019 report titled Threats to Seabirds of Northern Aotearoa New Zealand.

Putting together this report helped her identify some knowledge gaps which then guided the focus for her research.

Whitehead is studying four species of seabirds that breed in the Hauraki Gulf but travel different distances for migration - from long distance (rako, Buller's shearwater), to shorter (totorore, little shearwater, and tītī wainui, fairy prion) to the homebirds that don't tend to migrate (pakahā, fluttering shearwater).

Over the last three years she has visited islands in Tīkapa Moana where these birds breed. There, she assessed their health and foraging movements to see how both adults and chicks are doing during the intense period of chick rearing.

GPS tagging a subset of the birds has allowed Whitehead to get a glimpse into what areas of the ocean are important to them for finding food. On land, weighing the chicks, analysing their regurgitations or faeces, and sampling feathers to analyse for stress hormones, will give her an idea of how the feeding is going, and what the health of the colony is.

Now she is moving on to the analysis phase of her PhD - in the next few months she will line up the GPS tracking data with sea surface temperatures and extract the corticosterone stress hormone from the adult and chick feathers. …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details