Huge numbers of gannets and gulls follow the trawlers as by-catch – dead fish that cannot be sold – is thrown over the stern. (Pictures by Paul Hillion, 0852270)
THIS year’s attempts to study the island’s most elusive birds – those that stay firmly out at sea – proved unsuccessful.
Perhaps it was my presence on the ‘pelagic’ boat trip into the killing grounds of the English Channel that brought us bad luck, but maybe it was the weather.
Guernsey’s keenest birders switch their attentions to finding seabirds in mid-summer.
Each year ringer and seabird enthusiast Chris Mourant organises a couple of eight-hour trips to search for shearwaters, storm petrels and skuas.
A boat normally used by anglers is chartered, colleague Julian Medland organises a milk-urn full of foul-smelling chum – fish scraps to be thrown over the side as an attractant (the birders’ equivalent of chirvy used by anglers to bring in fish) – and away we go.
The trip is limited to 12 eager birdwatchers armed with binoculars, cameras, sandwiches and a huge amount of hope.
French trawlers are active in the area just beyond the island’s territorial limits – sometimes trawling along the precise demarcation line. These can be seen on Digimap’s brilliant marine traffic AIS map, each one named and its direction marked.
Charter boat skipper Richard Seager piloted Out The Blue on both of our trips. Huge numbers of gulls, gannets and the occasional great skua are attracted to the fishing boats in search of by-catch, those fish that are caught ‘accidentally’ while trawling for the marketable species.
It is truly a gruesome business.
Each of the 11 boats we saw on the first trip and one on the second had a large flock of birds following it. The amount of wasted sea-life that is thrown over the side is huge.
According to Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall – of River Cottage fame – in his brilliant book Fish, the trawlermen are killing huge quantities of fish against the spirit of conservation rules.
If they are fishing for a species on which there is a quota, for example, they will run the trawl for the first drop.
All the fish under quota are kept, possibly reaching the weight they are allowed to land.
They then have a second run and keep all the best fish, throwing away those that would not get such a good price in market.
This might be repeated a third and fourth time until their quota is made up of the best prime fish. Meanwhile, perhaps twice as much of the species being ‘conserved’ has been thrown back into the sea, dead.
Each haul might have two or three species under quota and another 10 kinds that can be sold.
So while the gannets and gulls are doing well out of the EEC rules, the very species the Brussels bureaucrats are trying to protect are in terminal decline.
This is not a cliche – cod on the banks off Newfoundland were once the most abundant fish in the North Atlantic. They are now extinct.
Common dolphins play across the bow of Richard Seager’s Out The Blue charter boat as birdwatchers motor in search of seabirds. (0852268)
Some of the rarer seabirds, such as Manx shearwaters and storm petrels, are also attracted to feed behind the trawlers but not on the two days we were out this year.
Wilson’s storm petrels and a black-browed albatross that should have been in the southern oceans were seen on similar trips out of the Isles of Scilly – but with us, hope curdled to despair.
Compensation came in the form of one harbour porpoise and a basking shark seen on the first trip in August, and a pod of about 30 common dolphins on the second pelagic late in September.
Wildlife photographer Paul Hillion was able to get the terrific shot of dolphins riding the boat’s bow-wave, gannets following one of the trawlers and two gulls playing aerial rugby with a discarded tomato.
- More of his work can be seen at www.paulhillion.com.
Article posted on 10th October, 2009 - 9.00am
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