Last week I started work on another part of my PhD project – monitoring the breeding success of little shearwaters. These wee birds are very cryptic. Unlike fluttering shearwaters, we very rarely see them at sea when doing pelagic trips, as they seem to spend more time offshore over deeper waters. I’ll be using GPS tracking devices to find out where they go in November – but for the moment I’ve been setting up my study areas and finding burrows to monitor. Together with my A++ team, I’ve spent the week finding burrows to check later on in the season to see if eggs have turned into fluffy chicks!

Breeding success information – how many breeding attempts in a population successfully end up in chicks fledging – is lacking for a lot of our seabird species in Aotearoa. Some critically endangered species are monitored, and there are a few long-term projects that have been tracking these metrics for years. For most species though, we haven’t got a very clear picture of how populations are doing. We know that seabirds face a large number of threats at sea and on land, but it’s difficult to quantify how much of an impact these threats are having because we don’t have this kind of information. Part of my research is setting up monitoring burrows to start gathering this information for a few different species that haven’t been particularly well studied so far. It’s very rewarding to poke a small endoscope into a hole in the ground and find a bird sitting on an egg – and hopefully come November there’ll be lots of fat fluffy chicks to see!