Birdlife International’s Rory Crawford blogs about his hopes for, and the outcomes of, a recent GAP2 exchange to Puget Sound, Washington State – read on to learn more about how bird bycatch is tackled in fisheries the other side of the world!
I’m back! My GAP2 Exchange to Puget Sound has undoubtedly left a lasting impression on me: having journeyed across the Atlantic (and right across the US to Washington State), I was hoping for a few things.
Rex and Rory visiting Pike Place Market, Seattle
I hoped that we would make good connections with fishers, management authorities and scientists.
I hoped that I’d come back brimming with ideas about how to further the cause of reducing seabird bycatch in gillnet fisheries.
I hoped that everyone involved would benefit from seeing things from a different perspective – whether that be from someone of a different nationality, industry or mind-set.
I hoped that Rex (the salmon fisherman I travelled with) and I would be able to build on our experience in the US and take home ideas to apply to UK fisheries.
(I also really hoped we’d see orcas and drink some good locally brewed beer, but that wasn’t strictly our raison d’être).
My first two hopes were really the core of the exchange – how can we build on the limited existing knowledge of seabird bycatch mitigation in gillnet fisheries and up-scale efforts globally?
Rory and Rex meet with Es Melvin to discuss his pioneering bird bycatch research
Tackling the matter head-on, we arranged to speak to people that were directly involved in some of the only published research on the matter (!) in the Puget Sound back in the 1990s.
We took a walk around Fisherman’s Terminal, Seattle, with seabird bycatch expert Ed Melvin, from Washington State University. Ed led the research that identified that a high-visibility white mesh section making up the upper 10% of salmon driftnets reduced common guillemot bycatch significantly. Combined with fishery openings that avoided peaks in bird abundance (particularly at change of light in the morning), bycatch could be further reduced. Helpfully, both of these measures could be implemented without significantly affecting fish catch.
Following Ed’s work, regulations were put in place by the state’s Department for Fish and Wildlife (DFW) requiring fishermen to use the modified ‘bird nets’, and to postpone the fishery opening until exactly one and half hours after dawn. On our walk around Fisherman’s Terminal, we were able to see several gillnet vessels with bird nets on their drums. Rex, Ed and I all pondered the importance of better understanding how both target and non-target species see the underwater world in designing mitigation measures that work: making nets visible to bycatch species but not target species is truly the holy grail.
Moving north to Bellingham, we spoke to Shannon Moore, a Puget Sound gillnet fisherman of several decades, about the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of this regulation. In his view, the bird nets and change in fishery openings basically saved the fishery – the threat of being shut down was very real, and cutting bycatch was a critical part of maintaining the fishery’s licence to operate.
We also spoke to Washington DFW, including several staff that were involved in the development of the regulation back in the 90s – they had similar reflections to Shannon on the importance of the research and the role it had to play in informing management.
As one of the few blasts of knowledge in an otherwise rather dark and unknown gillnet bycatch universe, I was keen to encourage the DFW to follow-up on Ed’s original work – are the measures still successful? What about impact on catch? Could further tweaks be made? As a fishery-scale experiment into the success of a mitigation measure, the opportunities for learning more are massive – with potentially huge lessons for other fisheries around the world. It’s also important to re-assert the value of the mitigation measures for fishers that have joined the fishery since regulations were put in place: we noticed from our conversations with crew and skippers on vessels (though our sample size is admittedly small) that younger fishers were less positive about the measures.
I’ll be pursuing these lines of enquiry in the coming months. We are already undertaking preliminary work in the Lithuanian bottom-set cod gillnet fishery to examine whether high-visibility panels could reduce sea duck bycatch. Next year we are co-hosting (with the American Bird Conservancy) a workshop seeking to find solutions to gillnet bycatch, working across countries, bycatch species (birds, turtles and marine mammals) and fishery types (bottom-set to driftnets). The Puget Sound experience will feed into this workshop strongly – several of the people mentioned in this blog will be attending!
Solar panels and sustainable salmon fishing – a ‘reef net’ fishery
But what next for Rex and I? Well this links to my third hope – that everyone would benefit from seeing things from a different perspective. What I actually found was that our perspectives really weren’t that different at all. Rex summed this up perfectly on the last morning of our exchange, with something his father used to say to him: “You only borrow nature – if you don’t look after it, it’ll come and bite you in your tail”. This takes me neatly to my fourth hope – we’ve definitely come back to the UK full of ideas, inspiration, a collaborative frame of mind and a desire to look after nature. Watch this space for what happens next in Rex’s fishery – and beyond.
P.S. We saw three pods of orca and drank marvellous beer – hopes abundantly fulfilled!
For further information on this exchange, please contact Katrina Borrow on Katrina@mindfullywired.org
@GAP2_project / #GAP2exchange
