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Pierre Yésou, Nicola Baccetti and Joe Sultana (eds), Ecology and Conservation of Mediterranean Seabirds and other bird species under the Barcelona Convention: Proceedings of the 13th Medmaravis pan-Mediterranean Symposium, Alghero, Sardinia, Italy, 14-17 October 2011. Medmaravis, 2012. 232 pp.

Medmaravis is an international NGO founded in Sardinia in 1984. Its aim is to enhance the study and conservation of coastal habitats and marine avifauna (seabirds, in common parlance) throughout the Mediterranean. Its symposia have become key gatherings of some of the Mediterranean’s – and the world’s – best experts on seabirds.

The 13th was held in 2011 at Alghero, Sardinia, a “melting pot of Mediterranean cultures”, we’re told by the blurb. Alghero is indeed an archetypal Mediterranean maritime town, its back resolutely to the hinterland and its front fortified in a cautious swap with the sea, that bringer of all things good and bad. It could be Valletta or Trapani or Marseilles, or anywhere really.

And that, perhaps, is one of the captivating things about seabirds. The minutiae of population estimates, incubation periods and burrow occupancy rates (with which this book is bursting at the seams, to be sure) will, of course, be of interest to ornithologists and conservation ecologists.

To the rest of us, it’s things like journeys that matter. These are, for the main part, birds that spend most of their lives at sea and only come inshore at night to breed in inaccessible cliffs and on remote islets.

To know and understand them is to take as one’s bearings the grand Braudelian theme of the sea as a connective rather than disjunctive element. It’s rather like studying ancient Greek art, or Roman trade routes.

The other attraction is the clandestine magic of shearwaters, say, that congregate every summer evening in large ‘rafts’ off places like Ta’ Ċenċ and Għar Ħasan and make landfall under the cover of darkness (it is well established that artificial light disturbs them greatly). That also means that sound is big in their world, which is why our cliffs come alive at night with what might be described as a thousand crying babies. It’s all weird and very wonderful, really.

Two of the book’s 37 chapters deal specifically with Malta; both are co-authored by Joe Sultana, one of the book’s editors and Maltese ornithologist extraordinaire, and John Borg, a seabird expert and curator of the National Museum of Natural History in Mdina. (We have it on the reliable authority of Mark Cocker’s Birds and People [2013] that seabirds have made it to Borg’s mobile ringtone.)

10 young birds were fitted with featherweight transmitters and their routes mapped using the latest satellite tracking technology

The first chapter takes us to Rdum il-Madonna (Mellieħa), where Malta’s largest colony of Yelkouan shearwaters – a species endemic to the Mediterranean – was first discovered in 1969. This piece is as much an account of methodological innovations in seabird ornithology as a snapshot of the current state-of-the-art characteristics of the colony.

From 1983 to 2006, the main research method was that of night visits, during which the adult birds making landfall and the young birds in their rock crevices were recorded and, when possible, ringed.

It turned out that ringing produced very few answers to the key question: What were the birds’ movements away from their breeding colonies?

The big chance came in 2006, when Birdlife-Malta secured major funding under the EU Life programme. Ten young birds were fitted with featherweight transmitters and their routes mapped using the latest satellite tracking technology.

Most were found to fly eastwards as far away as the Aegean and Black seas. The Life project also made it possible for the scientists to pretty much exterminate the rats that were devastating the breeding colonies.

The second, Malta-themed chapter looks at the ongoing research by Sultana, Borg and others on the Mediterranean Storm Petrel. This is a tiny species which spends its long life (27+ years in the case of one bird ringed on Filfla) covering epic distances at sea. One theory has it that it owes its name to its habit of taking a leaf from St Peter’s notebook and appearing to walk on the water.

As the Maltese name (kanġu ta’ Filfla) suggests, the islet is the local stronghold of the species. That said, a small colony was rediscovered in 1994 at Ta’ Ċenċ, the exact place where the French knight Turgot collected eight specimen in 1746.

The first systematic studies were conducted on Filfla by Joe Sultana and Charles Gauci 40-odd years ago. The book that resulted, Bird Studies on Filfla (1970), lent scientific firepower to the Ornithological Society’s (later Malta Ornithological Society and eventually Birdlife-Malta) successful campaign to get the British forces to stop using Filfla as a naval artillery target.

The population of petrels on Filfla was estimated to be in the region of 10,000 pairs in the early 1970s. A number of factors have since contrived to bring the number down to 5,000 to 8,000 pairs – still very substantial by any standards.

The 21,300 birds ringed there between 1968 and 2011 have yielded a wealth of information about breeding habits, movements at sea, longevity and site tenacity (the millimetrically remarkable extent to which birds will use the same spot year after year).

Storm petrels face their fair share of threats. It is known, for example, that the yellow-legged gulls that breed in growing numbers on Filfla often attack and eat petrels. Erosion too can be an issue as the whims of sea conditions make and unmake the rubble-rich habitat the birds require.

Seabird biology is, in many ways, the stuff of bearded science. The beauty of this book is that in dispensing with its generous dose, it never quite sidelines the magic.

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