4 February 2008    

Minnie: You can't shoot elephants in England.
Crun: Mnk? Why not?
Minnie: They're out of season.
Crun: Does this mean we'll have to have pelican for dinner again?
Minnie: Yes, I'm afraid so.
Crun: Then I'll risk it, I'll shoot an elephant out of season.
Announcer: Listeners who are listening will, of course, realize that Minnie and Henry are talking rubbish - as erudite people will realize, there are no elephants in Sussex. They are only found in Kent North on a straight line drawn between two points thus making it the shortest distance.

The Goon Show, The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler, by Spike Milligan

News of ADU projects will need to wait till next time, this report is long enough already. I try to get these together every month or so. This report covers four months - I have discovered that as the gap between them gets longer, the harder they are to do.

The Avian Demography Unit morphed into the Animal Demography Unit on 1 January 2008. We also moved from the Department of Statistical Sciences to the Department of Zoology. There is a rationale about the changes in the ADU page in the February-March 2008 issue of Africa - Birds & Birding.

The new ADU website is www.adu.org.za, but this is under construction. Current information for the main ADU projects is already accessible from the new website, but full consolidation between the new website and the old website at www.aviandemographyunit.org will take many months while to achieve.

The proceedings of the International Ornithological Congress, held in Hamburg in August 2006, have appeared in the Journal of Ornithology. Professor Jeremy Greenwood, Director of the British Trust for Ornithology, gave a congress plenary entitled Citizens, science and bird conservation (pdf of paper). He said good things about the ADU in the plenary, and these have been carried through to the published version:
There is little citizen ornithology in Africa, beset as the continent is with severe economic problems as well as the practical difficulties of tropical ornithology. Nonetheless, the remarkable Avian Demography Unit in South Africa (operating also in neighbouring states) shows what determined vision can produce, in terms of fine amateur-professional collaboration, even in countries wracked by political and economic upheavals. There is an active ringing scheme, the second atlas is about to start and there are programmes for monitoring wetlands, reserves and large birds in the wider countryside.

People

The extract above from the Goon Show is for Marta de Ponte, who is spending the next few months in the US, working with Professor Rauri Bowie, University of California in Berkeley, doing pelican genetics.

Yahkat counts waders during the North West Australia Shorebird Expedition. The team ringed over 4000 waders.

Yahkat Barshep spent three weeks with the North West Australian Shorebird Expedition in Broome, Western Australia. She reported that it was hotter than Nigeria. This expedition provided her with hands on experience of shorebirds, and the opportunity to be mentored by her Australian PhD cosupervisor, Dr Clive Minton.

Res Altwegg had his Swiss Science Foundation postdoc renewed for a further year.

Birgit Erni was promoted to Senior Lecturer in the Department of Statistical Sciences.

Two MSc students submitted their theses in December. Darren Houniet, who has been based at SANBI, working on dwarf chameleon distributions, cosupervised by Krystal Tolley and myself, and Dismas Ntirampeba, who did the dissertation component of his MSc doing a sophisticated mathematical statistical analysis of the Swift Tern growth data that was a key component of Janine le Roux's MSc in 2006. Those of you with long memories will remember the weekly trips to Robben Island to weigh and measure Swift Tern chicks in the winter of 2002.

The three students with "penguin PhDs" at the ADU, Phil Whittington, Jessica Kemper and Anton Wolfaardt all start new posts early in 2008. We wish you great successes in your new roles

Anton Wolfaardt graduated with a PhD in December. He is the last of the long line of Zoologists with PhDs in Mathematical Statistics! The transfer of the ADU to the Department of Zoology on 1 January 2008 resolved this anachronism. The main messages in Anton's PhD are summarised in the ADU page in the December 2007-January 2008 issue of Africa - Birds & Birding. Anton has accepted a post with the Agreement for the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP) from March. He is on the verge of submitting all his PhD papers in one fowl swoop - well done, on all counts, Anton.

Phil Whittington, ADU PhD graduate in 2002, has been appointed to the post of ornithologist at the East London Museum.

Jessica Kemper, ADU PhD graduate in 2006, has been appointed to the seabird biologist post at Lüderitz by the Namibian Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources.

John Cooper is back on Gough Island, pulling out weeds for the UK Government.

Marius Burger got bitten on the right thumb by a puffadder while doing fieldwork for SARCA (the reptile atlas). It was a nasty injury. In saving the thumb, Marius has stretched medical expertise to its limits.

Adin Stamelman (PhD) and Thierry Rouget (MA) formally started their research at the beginning of the year. Both are registered in the Department of Historical Studies. Adin will be extracting seabird biology out of the official archives, and Thierry will be doing likewise for the seals, delving back into the 19th century. Chief supervisor is Professor Lance van Sittert, and cosupervisors are Rob Crawford and myself, and in addition Thierry has Professor Marthán Bester from the Mammal Research Institute of the University of Pretoria as cosupervisor.

Res Altwegg and team continued to defy gravity to ring Hadeda chicks. They had reached 94 chicks by the middle of January.

In various ways, we continue to put our best foot forward for oystercatcher conservation

Sophie Kohler is a PhD student at the University of Reunion. Her project is provisionally entitled Comparative feeding ecologyof the African Black Oystercatcher related to environmental variability, on the South African coastline. She is based at Rhodes University, and I am one of the cosupervisors. During January, she did fieldwork on Robben Island and the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station.

Gordon Moir and team kept track of the oystercatchers breeding on Robben Island again this year. By the end of January they had found 73 nests. This is the sixth year of intensive year monitoring of this population.

Dr Bruno Ens, SOVON, the Netherlands, and I coordinated an Oystercatcher Workshop during the Internatonl Wader Study Group Conference in La Rochelle, France, on 1 October. The purpose of the workshop was to provide a platform to discuss the conservation status and associated research requirements of the 11 species, so that common threat factors can be better understood, leading to more effective conservation prescriptions. Presentations representied the three New Zealand species, the two Australian species, the African species, the Eurasian species, the two North American species, and one of the two South American species, so it was a fully international workshop, with a strong southern hemisphere bias. The abstracts of the 13 papers presented at the workshop will be published in the December issue of the Wader Study Group Bulletin, but a sneak preview is available here.

In December, the 17th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals was held in Africa for the first time, at the Cape Town International Conference Centre. Two ex-ADU employees did a lion's share of the organising: Michelle du Toit and Meredith Thornton. At the conference, the ADU was represented by Steve Kirkman, Newi Makhado, Silvia Mecenero, Mdu Seakamela and Mariëtte Wheeler. Between them they presented an impressive number of orals, videos and posters. No wonder the ADU needed to change name. The marine mammal conference presentations are listed separately below.

Fairy Tern adult delivering a flying fish to its chick on Cousin Island, Seychelles

Rob Crawford and I spent the last money in Rob's BCLME Top Predators' Project budget going to the Seychelles in December. Actually, the trip had been built into the project right from the start, as a means to build linkages with seabird researchers in the western Indian Ocean. As luck would have it, Professor Matthieu le Corre and Dr Sébastien Jaquemet, University of Reunion, organized a seabird workshop in the Seychelles with precision timing in terms of the last date whereby the money had to be spent. The three-day workshop was attended by many of the big names in seabird ornithology, and Rob made a presentation on behalf of the South African team. There were two days of presentations and a one-day outing to Cousin Island.

Dr Tony Williams retired at the end of November. Tony had been seconded by CapeNature to the ADU for the past six years. We will still be able to draw on Tony's wealth of expertise in the various arenas in which he was our resident expert: waterbirds, seabirds, wetlands, offshore islands, and many other aspects of ornithology.

At the end of the year, we bid farewell to James Harrison, who has been part of the ADU since long before it started. James was part of the conspiracy which led to SABAP1 being "continued" in the Department of Statistical Sciences, the decisive event which culminated in the formal recognition of the ADU by the UCT Research Committee in 1991. James played a key role in many other ADU initiatives, and his ability to set things in motion against all odds will be sorely missed.

Prideel Majiedt was appointed to a position in the marine programme at SANBI, and resigned at the end of January. We wish her all the best in her new and challenging position. Prideel started out in the ADU as a one-year field assistant on Marion Island, continued as an intern capturing data for SAFRING, and was then appointed data capturer for the butterfly atlas.

Visitors from the University of Gdansk, Poland, arrived in mid-January. Dr Magda Remisiewicz returned to the ADU fold, this time in the capacity of a Claude Leon Foundation postdoc for two years. We welcomed Professor Wlodek Meissner, head of the Avian Ecophysiology Unit, Department of Vertebrate Ecology & Zoology, University of Gdansk, for two months. Both do research primarily on waders. After a few days of preparation Magda and Wlodek set out for five weeks of fieldwork, in Pietermartizburg, with Dr Barry Taylor, and at Barberspan, where their visit is hosted by Professor Henk Bouwman, at the University of the North-West, and Sampie van der Merwe, Park Manager of Barberspan Bird Sanctury, Delareyville, North-West Province.

Submitted papers

Angel A, Wanless RM, Cooper J Review of impacts of the introduced House Mouse on islands in the Southern Ocean: regional details, global relevance. Biological Invasions (special issue).

Young DJ Trends in populations of Blue Crane Anthropoides paradiseus, Grey Crowned Crane Balearica regulorum and Wattled Cranes Bugeranus carunculatus within agricultural regions in South Africa.

Mullers RHE, Navarro RA, Crawford RJM, Underhill LG Variation in growth of Cape Gannet chicks: the importance of food quality. Marine Ecology Progress Series.

Makhado AB, Meÿer MA, Crawford RJM, Underhill LG, Wilke C The efficacy of culling seals seen preying on seabirds as a means of reducing seabird mortality. African Journal of Ecology.

Musangu, M, de Ponte Machado M, Ryan PG Breeding seabirds at Dassen Island, South Africa: can they survive Great White Pelican predation? Endangered Species Research.

Crawford RJM, Underhill LG, Altwegg R, Dyer BM, Upfold L Trends in numbers of Kelp Gulls Larus dominicanus off western South Africa, 1978-2005. Emu.

Schultz PA, Simmons RE, Mendelsohn JM, Underhill LG, Diekmann M Seeing the food for the trees: An experimental and satellite-tracking study of foraging success of threatened Cape Vulture Gyps coprotheres in bush encroached areas of Namibia. Journal of Applied Ecology.

Altwegg R, Wheeler M, Erni B Climate and the range dynamics of species with imperfect detection. Biology Letters.

In press

Paterson BMCJ, Brown CJ, Lindeque P, Beytell B, Demas F, Underhill LG, Weaver C, Schinzel B, Dunne TT A knowledge based approach to transboundary wildlife management. South African Journal of Wildlife Research.

Published

Assunção P, de Ponte Machado M, Ramírez AS, Rosales RS, Antunes NT, Poveda C, De le Fe C, Poveda JB 2007 Prevalence of pathogens in Great White Pelicans (Pelecanus onocrotalus) from the Western Cape, South Africa. Journal of Applied Animal Research 32: 29-32.

Braby J, Underhill LG 2007. Was poor breeding productivity of African Black Oystercatchers on Robben Island in 2004/05 caused by Feral Cats, Kelp Gulls, Mole Snakes or the Sumatra tsunami? Wader Study Group Bulletin 113: 66-70.

Over the past few years, Dyer Island has hosted the largest breeding colonies of Cape Cormorants

Crawford RJM, Dyer BM, Kemper J, Simmons RE, Upfold L 2007. Trends in numbers of Cape Cormorants (Phalacrocorax capensis) over a 50-year period, 1956-57 to 2006-07. Emu 107: 253-261.

Erni B, Altwegg R, Underhill LG 2007. An index to compare geographical distributions of species. Diversity and Distributions 13: 829-835.

Oschadleus HD, Brooks M 2006. Raptor ringing and recovery report, 2004-05, for southern Africa. Gabar 17(2): 14-18.

Paterson B, Stuart-Hill G, Underhill LG, Dunne TT, Schinzel B, Brown C, Beytell B, Demas F, Lindeque P, Tagg J, Weaver C 2008. A fuzzy decision support tool for wildlife translocations into communal conservancies in Namibia. Environmental Modelling and Software 23: 521-534.

Ryan PG, Cuthbert RJ, Cooper, J 2007. Two-egg clutches in albatrosses. Emu 107: 210-213.

Simmons RE, Baker N, Braby R, Dodman T, Nasirwa O, Tyler S, Versfeld W, Wearne K, Wheeler M 2007. Is the Chestnut-banded Plover an overlooked globally Near Threatened species? Bird Conservation International 17: 283-293.

Tjørve KMC, Underhill LG, Visser GH 2008. The energetic implications of precocial development for three shorebird species breeding in a warm environment. Ibis 150: 125-138.

van Jaarsveld AS, Pauw JC, Mundree S, Mecenero S, Coetzee BWT, Alard GF 2007. South African Environmental Observation Network: vision, design and status. South African Journal of Science 103: 289-294.

Williams AJ 2007. Book review: Wetlands International 2006. Waterbird Population Estimates - Fourth Edition. Wageningen: Wetlands International. Ostrich 78: 661-663.

Conference presentations - general

Crawford RJM 2007. Seabirds as bioindicators in the Benguela system. Seabirds as Bioindicators in the Western Indian Ocean Workshop. Victoria, Seychelles. Oral.

Ens B, Underhill LG (Coordinators) 2007. Workshop: Conservation status of oystercatchers around the world. 2007 International Wader Study Group Annual Conference. La Rochelle, France. Workshop.

Remisiewicz M, Gustowska A, Underhill LG, Tree AJ, Taylor PB 2007. Pattern of primary moult of adult Wood Sandpipers at southern African non-breeding grounds. 2007 International Wader Study Group Annual Conference. La Rochelle, France. Oral

Remisiewicz M, Underhill LG, Tree AJ, Gustowska A, Taylor PB 2007. Strategies of primary moult among immature Wood Sandpipers (Tringa glareola) at southernmost wintering grounds. 42nd Workshop on Evolutionary Biology and Related Topics. Warsaw, Poland. Oral.

Underhill LG, Loewenthal M 2007. African Black Oystercatcher Haematopus moquini. Workshop: Conservation status of oystercatchers around the world. 2007 International Wader Study Group Annual Conference. La Rochelle, France. Oral.

Conference presentations - 17th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals

Bester MN, Hofmeyr GJG, Kirkman SP, Pistorius PA Site fidelity of female Southern Elephant Seals in relation to age. Poster.

Drapeau L, Olsen EJS, Bjørge A, Kirkman SP, Mauritzen M, Meÿer MA, Mukapuli NA, Oosthuizen H, Roux J-P Environmental characterization of Cape Fur Seal foraging grounds, relative to conditions in the southern Benguela ecosystem. Poster.

Kirkman SP Mummy's boy: lactophilia in an adult male Cape Fur Seal. Video.

Kirkman SP, Meÿer MA, Oosthuizen H, Roux J-P, Seakamela MS, Underhill LG The Cape Fur Seal and ecosystem monitoring: priorities, problems and prospects. Workshop: Marine Mammal Research and Conservation in Africa. Oral.

Kirkman SP, Oosthuizen H, Meÿer MA, Kotze D, Roux J-P, Underhill LG Making sense out of censuses - dealing with missing data: trends in pup counts of Cape Fur Seals for the period 1972-2004. Oral.

Cape Fur Seal attacking a juvenile Cape Gannet. Newi Makhado has shown the level of predation to be unsustainable (photo: Mike Meÿer MCM)

Makhado AB, Crawford RJM, Underhill LG Impact of predation by Cape Fur Seals Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus on Cape Gannets Morus capensis at Malgas Island, Western Cape, South Africa. Poster.

Mauritzen M, Kirkman SP, Olsen EJS, Bjørge A, Drapeau L, Meÿer MA, Mukapuli NA, Oosthuizen H, Roux J-P Variation in Cape Fur Seal foraging behaviour reflects large-scale ecosystem changes. Poster.

Mecenero S, Krakstad J-O, Underhill LG, Kirkman SP, Roux J-P Can seal diet contribute towards fisheries management? Poster.

Mulaudzi TW, Hofmeyr GJG, Bester MN, Kirkman SP, Pistorius PA, Jonker FC, Makhado AB, Owen JH, Grimbeek RJ Haulout site selection by Southern Elephant Seals at Marion Island. Poster.

Munyai F, Bester MN, Kirkman SP, Hofmeyr GJG The influence of age and sex on local movements of Southern Elephant Seals during the breeding season haulout. Poster.

Olsen EJS, Bjørge A, Drapeau L, Kirkman SP, Mauritzen M, Meÿer MA, Mukapuli NA, Oosthuizen H, Roux J-P Spatial and temporal variations in foraging behaviour of Cape Fur Seals (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) from four colonies in South Africa. Poster.

Ramunasi AJ, Bester MN, Hofmeyr GJG, Kirkman SP, Mecenero S The diet of the Subantarctic Fur Seal at Marion Island. Poster.

Seakamela MS, Bester MN, de Bruyn PJN, Mecenero S Cephalopods in the diet of the Cape Fur Seal (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) at three mainland colonies off the Namibian coast. Poster.

Wheeler M, Bester MN, de Villiers MS The effects of helicopter disturbance and pedestrian approaches on the response behaviour of fur seals at Marion Island. Poster.

Published conference abstract

Harebottle DM, Oschadleus HD 2007 Waterbird ringing in Africa - past trends and future scope. Abstract. Ostrich 78: 509.

Popular publications

Oschadleus HD 2007 Early Southern Masked and Cape Weaver nests. Promerops 272: 15.

Oschadleus HD 2007 Red-billed Quelea influx into the Western Cape. Promerops 271: 18.

Submitted theses

Darren's MSc shows that Cape Dwarf Chameleons are on a climate change tightrope

Houniet, Darren Present and future distribution ranges of the Cape Dwarf Chameleon Bradypodion pumilum. MSc, University of Cape Town.

Ntirampeba, Dismas The analysis of longitudinal growth data. Dissertation component of MSc in Statistical Sciences, University of Cape Town. (started 2006, submission 2007)

Graduated

Wolfaardt, Anton C 2007. The effects of oiling and rehabilitation on the breeding productivity and annual moult and breeding cycles of African Penguins. PhD, University of Cape Town

ADU Report for September 2007

Professor Les Underhill
Director: Avian Demography Unit      www.aviandemographyunit.org
Vice-President: International Ornithological Committee
University of Cape Town     Rondebosch 7701     South Africa
Phone +27 21 650 3227     Cell 072 062 1140     Fax 021 650 3434

Southern African Bird Atlas Project 2    www.sabab2.org

12th Pan-African Ornithological Congress, Goudini Spa, Cape Town
7-12 September 2008     www.paoc2.org

25th International Ornithological Congress, Campos do Jordao, Brazil
22-28 August 2010     www.ib.usp.br/25ioc