At the end of September, I was invited by Rossing Uranium Limited, a large uranium mine that is owned by Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ), to present a talk to a group of secondary school students. They were taking part in the Rossing Bird Day. RTZ conducts this Birdlife partnered activity annually as part of their environmental programme. This project is an international event where RTZ companies support a Bird Day with schools in nearby communities to raise awareness of the environment. Speaking to young people from the coastal communities is an important part of our work as it will be these young people who will be responsible for managing our marine environment sustainably in the future.
October is the peak spawning season for hake off our coast. Because of this, October is a closed season with no hake fishing activities. As we are not able to go to sea, we are stuck in the office doing admin work!
The factories are all on minimal production and this period is used to do maintenance on all vessels and processing plants. This is a busy time for the maintenance teams. The lift at the dry dock (where vessels are lifted out of the water for maintenance) has several hake vessels up for annual inspections and repainting. No fishing also means that many fishermen are available for courses and training at the Namibian Fisheries Institute (NAMFI) or in house training at their respective companies.
WWF South Africa has developed a two day Sustainable Fishing course for the hake trawl fishery. The course content focuses on the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management (EAF) and highlights the effects of fishing on the environment, ecosystem and food webs. An important component of this course is seabird bycatch. In conjunction with WWF South Africa, we at the Albatross Task Force in Namibia host this course with the support of NAMFI.
Last week we ran two courses to a total of 45 fishermen, observers and inspectors. Feedback from the course was very positive and many of the participants highlighted the seabird component as the most interesting. The course is very interactive, so before the seabird section we establish the participants’ perception of the effects of trawling on seabirds. The general consensus is that there is little effect from trawlers whilst longliners kill many birds.
After this section, where we include a very graphic video clip of seabirds flying into a trawl warp, many of the participants comment that they were not aware of the impacts, which in Namibia may be as high as 10,000 birds a year, and would like to do something about it. They all expressed an interest in tori lines, and several requested these.
Even though we are unable to go to sea in October, by collaborating with other conservation bodies we are able to get the message across to several sectors of the fishing industry. It is truly rewarding to teach a group of people about how special and fragile the marine environment is and see how their perceptions of what the impacts of their activities are. These training courses have shown me that while our work at sea is vital; on shore training to a wider audience is just as important.
Another exciting development in my work was downloading the new ATF database that has been specially developed for the ATF by OLRAC. This database will standardise all the ATF teams’ data and make it easier to access and share. So in between other office tasks I have been entering data from my trips. We have been conducting experiments to assess the effectiveness of tori lines. This work will be used to show the Namibian fishing industry and government the impacts of trawling on seabirds, but more importantly, that it will be simple to solve. It is this kind of activity that makes it special for me to be involved with seabird conservation.