Our man (Andy Schofield) writes:
One of my favourite birds without a shadow of a doubt during my time in Pitcairn has been the Red-Tailed Tropicbird which Pitcairner’s call “The Bosun Bird”. They can be difficult to see well as their breeding distribution on the island has been contracted back to the inaccessible cliffs and ledges probably due to the predation of young birds by rats and cats. Before this they would have been seen nesting on the ground all around the island. Throughout the day they can be seen around their nesting sites in small but raucous groups of two or three to more than a dozen or so. The males are always in a state of showing off and displaying with up to several males following a female and taking it in turns to swoop up in front of her, hover and then seemingly attempt to fly backwards in an attempt to reveal his aerial prowess before swooping away to the back of the queue for his next turn to try and impress the seemingly oblivious female. Then, all of a sudden the female will like what she sees and will also attempt to try to hover and fly backwards and then peel away and stoop off sharply, twisting and turning from a great height down to the sea with the chosen male only inches behind her copying her every move, turn and glide for several hundred metres as if he was an exact mirror image of her. It is behaviour of true beauty and grace that I will never tire of watching.
Red Tailed Tropicbird
A young Red Tailed Tropicbird blown off its cliff nest during a tropical storm.
As I mentioned previously the Tropic birds now only nest on the sheer inaccessible cliffs nowadays and this alone brings its own danger. At certain times of year the tropical storms and especially the winds can be ferocious and occasionally young Tropic birds are encountered sitting in the middle of the road having being blown from their cliff ledges. Pitcairner’s are very fond of this particular species and will often care for these birds, catching and feeding them small fish every day until they are able to fledge.
Pitcairn has a good population of Red-Tailed Tropicbirds with possibly in excess of a hundred pairs breeding on the Island at any one time. The much rarer and infrequently encountered White-Tailed Tropicbird causes great excitement when one is seen and many of the locals would instantly come and tell me with great glee that they had seen one. I only ever encountered a few individuals, usually during strong Northerly winds and when there was a general influx of displaced seabirds around the Island such as Brown, Red Footed and Blue Footed Boobies, Sooty Shearwaters and various Petrels such as the fantastic looking White Necked and Juan Fernadez Petrels, but excitingly, mid way through my three months on Pitcairn a pair of White Tailed Tropicbirds are as I write displaying and prospecting a nest site on the small cliff below the house where I am staying. I really hope that these stunning seabirds stay and successfully breed on Pitcairn.
Murphy’s Petrel hugging the coastline during high winds
Greater Frigatebirds make high winds look effortless.
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!