Our man (Andy Schofield) writes:
My ringing desk (with a view)
Today, I was going to attempt to catch and colour ring the endemic Pitcairn Reed Warbler. This would enable individuals to be identifiable and give us a greater insight into their behaviour, habitat needs and in depth ecology. Pitcairn Reed Warbler is a single island endemic of which we know very little about and hopefully this opportunity to study them a will give us a much better understanding of this very rare and important species. Pitcairn residents colloquially call this species “The Pitkern Sparrow” and speak of it with affection; they are also very excited at the prospect of better understanding its requirements and are keen to re sight colour ringed birds to build up that knowledge picture. So much so that many of the community members are wanting to take a personal interest in this project and want me to catch “their birds” that they see around their gardens so they can follow and recognise their individuals and feed that information back. The Pitcairn Reed Warbler is very unlike our own Reed Warbler, here, they are very arboreal spending much of their time high in the canopy, energetically running up and down the tree limbs, hanging upside down, reminiscent of the new world Black and White Warbler. This makes them very difficult to catch indeed, almost impossible.
Mist net set at Pulua school
Pitcairn Reed Warbler (Yellow – White over Orange)
But not always impossible! There is a narrow window of an hour or so at each end of the day when the sun has lost some of its intense heat that they will venture out of the canopy and feed nearer the ground on small insects. This is when I have a narrow window of opportunity to try and catch them.
Once caught a series of measurement or biometrics are taken and a unique set of colour rings are placed on individuals which will help us build a picture of survival rate, age, moult patterns, habitat preferences and many other facets to their life histories.
This is a unique opportunity, one of which I am incredibly excited and extremely lucky to have the chance to do. Right at the cutting edge of research into “our” birds, Pitcairn Reed Warbler is possibly the last British bird to be caught and studied in this way, a bird we know almost nothing about!
Pitcairn Reed Warbler (White-Pink over Red)
I have managed to catch and individually mark six birds up to now and I look forward to learning from them and telling you what they can tell me!
We've been working with the UK's amazing Overseas Territories for almost 20 years, but are still only scratching the surface of understanding their wonderful wildlife. One of the most remote and little known Territory environments is found in the Pitcairn Islands, the last remaining British Territory in the Pacific. Home to the extremely friendly descendants of the Mutiny on the Bounty, the Territory is made up of one inhabited island (Pitcairn) and three uninhabited ones.
We have a longstanding programme underway to restore one of these off-islands (Henderson Island World Heritage Site), but were conscious that the environment of Pitcairn itself is in many ways less studied than that of its uninhabited neighbours. Staff members have spent ten days on Pitcairn in consultation with the local community in 2010 and 2012, but as far as we are aware almost no general terrestrial conservationists have spent more than a week or two on the island. No one therefore really has any idea how big or threatened the population of the unique local bird, the Pitcairn reed-warbler, is, several of the island's unique plant species may be down to just a few individuals, and what invertebrate species exist on this fertile volcanic pinnacle is an almost untouched world still awaiting exploration and discovery.
We've therefore sent our new Overseas Territories Officer, Andy Schofield, to Pitcairn for three months to work alongside the Pitcairners and try to answer some of these questions. We're very excited to see what he may find!