Many of
Earth’s plant and animal species are at imminent risk of extinction. But with
the resources necessary to conserve them so sorely limited, where should
efforts be focused? The term “ecological triage” has been coined for
such decision-making, after the system invented by French army medics to sort patients by
the urgency of their need. This borrowing of metaphor from the Napoleonic and
World Wars is not accidental: in envisaging the damage done to nature by
humanity, you are to think of cannonballs and scorched earth and mustard gas.
A big draw for those who study the natural world is the search for adventure – the chance to make a novel discovery, and to explore regions unknown to science. Despite that, in today’s world, such an opportunity rarely presents itself, and it is exceedingly rare to truly break new ground. However, in the summer of 2017 circumstances allowed a team of scientists from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Halu Oleo University (UHO) and Operation Wallacea (Opwall) to venture to the remote, and scientifically unknown, Menui Island, in South-east Sulawesi, Indonesia. The expedition’s motive was to provide an account of the bird species present and their associating habitats. Our survey work, published in the latest issue of Forktail, found the island to be home to a unique avifauna and several important habitats, though these face serious threats from over-exploitation.
The Wallacea region has always been known to be home to many unique species, with birds of paradise, giant reptiles and marsupial versions of sloths found among its many islands! The region takes its name from Alfred Russel Wallace, who along with Darwin, developed the theory of evolution from his studies of the species of Wallacea. When I first set my heart on a career as a Zoologist (a decision made with absolute certainty at age 12!) I dreamed of following in the footsteps of these great naturalists. So it is of no surprise that when I finally got around to starting my PhD many years later, I chose to study speciation (the formation of new species during the course of evolution) in the birds of Wallacea, with the hope the region still held mysteries to uncover. Our research focused on South-east Sulawesi, Indonesia. Sulawesi is a weird and wonderful part of the world, and island hopping through that region has provided me with a lifetime of unforgettable memories. It also allowed me to fulfill my dream, as in our recent paper in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, we describe two new bird species from the Wakatobi Islands, an island chain off South-east Sulawesi (Figure 1).
As someone who regularly requires the use of wild birds in my research, I often worry that the methods of capture and subsequent identification I use might in some way impede the individuals I capture upon release. I use wild blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) which I identify by means of a metal ring in conjunction with a unique combination of colour rings. Ringing has been used as a method of bird identification since 1909 when the first bird, a Lapwing ( Vanellus vanellus), was ringed in Aberdeen. Since then ringing has become one of the safest and most commonly used method of identification of wild-caught birds and as such has been an invaluable tool for the study of bird populations. One only has to look at some of the data collected by ringers on the age of some birds to be astounded by how long some individuals survive, information which would be extremely difficult to come by without the use of rings.
More recently however, other methods of identification have become increasingly popular, which are used in conjunction with ringing. Perhaps one of the most well known would be the use of wing tags, which are currently in use with the reintroduced Red Kite (Milvus milvus) here in Ireland, which I might add has been a huge success thus far. Yet data published in a recent study by Trefry et al. 2013 suggests that for some species the use of wing tags can be detrimental. Trefry et al. Studied the magnificent frigatebird (Fregata magnificens), a spectacular sea bird which is unusual in many ways not least for the fact that as a species that forages at sea they make every effort never to land on the surface of the water. In this study the researchers compared the effects of various methods of identification and measurement taking on the reproductive success of the birds. What they found was quite alarming, individuals which were simply ringed fared no different to individuals which were untouched by the researchers, but those which had wing tags added reared significantly fewer chicks to fledging. The reasons for this are as yet unclear, perhaps the addition of the tags impairs the aerodynamics of the wings to such an extent that tagged adults are less proficient foragers and therefore unable to meet the nutritional demands of their young.
There are more examples cited in the study by Trefry et al. which highlight the negative effect of such tags on other species of bird (as well as those on which they have no effect), which makes it clear that more research is needed in this area, to my knowledge no such study (and correct me if I’m wrong) has been carried out for our reintroduced red kites so one would hope that they are not doomed to fail before they begin.
