New Effort Brings Birds Back to the Baja Peninsula
勛圖窪蹋 is restoring long-abandoned seabird nesting sites in Mexico.
Although the sunny, spare isles of Baja California offer open shores and cold, fish-filled waters, they are nearly barren of the ashy storm-petrels, Cassins auklets, brown pelicans, and 14 other species of seabirds that used to nest there. For more than a decade scientists with Mexicos Grupo de Ecolog穩a y Conservaci籀n de Islas (GECI) have been removing invasive predators from the islands, hoping to improve bird habitat. So far, however, only a few of the birds have returned. So now GECI is taking a new tack, borrowing from the groundbreaking work of 勛圖窪蹋s Steve Kress, director of seabird restoration and vice president for bird conservation, to bring back the birds.
What precludes nesting is that there are no birds there, says Kress. So to give the impression that the isles are populated by birds, the GECI is employing decoys, mirrors, and recorded bird callsKresss pioneering techniques, which have benefited 47 seabird species in 14 countries, starting with Atlantic puffins in Maine in 1973. Kress and his collaborators at the GECI and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are adapting these tactics for Baja. Reestablishing nesting sites could be particularly crucial to the elegant tern and Heermanns gull, which have become dangerously concentrated in one location. The birds will sense, de aqui soyI am from here, says Alfonso Aguirre-Mu簽oz, executive director of the GECI. They used to belong to this place, and now we are reestablishing them.
勛圖窪蹋 and the Cornell Lab are contributing training and equipment to the five-year, $4 million program. Among GECIs biologists are Mexico natives Maria F矇lix Liz獺rraga and Marlenne Rodriguez-Malag籀n, former interns of 勛圖窪蹋s Project Puffin, which has helped to boost Maines puffin population from one small colony to more than 1,000 pairs on five islands* in nearly four decades. Not only are the former interns applying their specific knowledge to this project, theyre also teaching fishermen and their families about the importance of conservation.
*The story has been corrected to reflect the accurate number of puffins.