ADU travels, expeditions and events

Leslie Gordon Underhill Elected a University Fellow as two ADU Students Graduate With PhDs

Photo John Cooper Phil, Genevieve and Les after the graduation ceremony

The Avian Demography Unit was well represented at a graduation ceremony held for the Faculty of Science at UCT on 11 December 2002. Firstly, the ADU's Director, Les Underhill, was made a Fellow of the university, a high honour that "recognizes sustained and original contributions through research or creative endeavour". Les's citation read out at the ceremony is given in full below.

But this was not all: PhDs were awarded to Phil Whittington and Lorenzo Serra for their theses on the African Penguin and Grey Plover, respectively, at the same ceremony. Their citation texts as printed in the graduation booklet are also given below.

And more: the degree of Master of Science in Zoology was awarded to Genevieve Jones, an ADU Research Officer, based on work she had conducted previously at UCT. In the audience was Samantha Petersen, also an ADU researcher working on seabirds, who had recently heard she had been awarded her BSc in Zoology by correspondence through UNISA. This will allow her to proceed to read Zoology Honours at UCT next year, when the ADU expects that her projects will retain a marine ornithological flavour.

All in all, a good day for the ADU, as shown by the happy faces of Phil, Genevieve and Les in the post-graduation photograph. Lorenzo was not able to travel from Italy for the graduation ceremony.

CITATION TEXTS

Les Underhill

Leslie Gordon Underhill is a graduate of UCT, having the degrees of BSc, BSc (Hons) in Mathematics (1969), MSc in Operations Research (1971) and PhD in Mathematical Statistics (1973). He then rebelled against abstract mathematics, and retrained himself as an applied statistician. He spent a sabbatical in New Zealand visiting Professor George Seber (inventor of the Jolly-Seber method) to learn how to estimate survival rates from capture-recapture data.

He had also trained as a bird ringer, and was a founder member of the Western Cape Wader Study Group. He devoted much time to gathering data on shorebirds along the coastline and estuaries of southern Africa. As a statistician, he was roped in to analyse the data, and co-authored a series of papers on shorebirds, most of them migrants from the Siberian tundra. Where statistical methods were needed to handle unusual types of data, he developed new approaches.

He joined an international team of ornithologists that successfully tested the idea that the breeding success of the Siberian migrants to South Africa was linked to the abundance of lemmings - when lemmings were abundant, Arctic Foxes preyed on them and the waders had high breeding productivity; when lemmings were scarce, after being abundant but hunted out the previous year, the foxes quartered the tundra, destroying virtually all nests at the egg stage. Thus Underhill helped demonstrate the remarkable fact that lemming cycles in Siberia were mirrored and visible at Langebaan Lagoon.

His involvement with marine research broadened from estuarine and coastal birds to seabirds, and fisheries. His commitment to the African Penguin dates back to a ringing expedition to Dassen Island in 1973, and has continued ever since. He was deeply involved with the Apollo Sea spill of 1994, and maintained a project that followed up the fortunes of the 4000 oiled and cleaned penguins. He demonstrated unequivocally that cleaning oiled penguins made conservation sense, and undoubtedly helped secure immediate government support for the operation. During the 2000 oil spill, Underhill was responsible for the website that depicted the travels of "Peter", "Pamela" and "Percy", still the world's most famous penguins. This story drew world attention to the plight of the 19 000 oiled penguins that were being cleaned by SANCCOB.

In 1991, he started the Avian Demography Unit. The ADU brought the Atlas of Southern African Birds into existence. This work includes distribution maps of all bird species occurring in the region, including those associated with marine environment. He now leads a strong team of staff and students, with co-supervisors drawn from the pool of expertise outside of the universities; this group is tackling a wide array of marine and wetland projects. Some of these projects have a focus on species of seabirds, shorebirds and seals. Others have a statistical focus, modelling patterns and processes. An important new area is the development of indices of the health of the marine and wetland environments.

His enduring contributions to statistical methods include the prey-switching model, the order of avian primary moult model, and work in the generation of random orthogonal matrices. Contributions to techniques of statistical analysis include work on basic structure display and low-dimensional representation of highly complex multidimensional data, especially the co-efficient of variation bi-plot. His extensive programmes were included in the package GENSTAT, a software product emerging from Rothamsted Experimental Station, the source of the modern discipline of biometry.

Les Underhill is a consummate statistical scientist, and has made a major contribution to several diverse aspects of statistical, ornithological and marine sciences. He is a recipient of the Herschel Gold Medal of the Royal Society of South Africa.

Lorenzo Serra, BSc(Bologna)

Thesis Title: Cold winters vs long journeys: adaptations of primary moult and body mass to migration and wintering in the Grey Plover, Pluvialis squatarola

Lorenzo Serra grew up in Rimini, Italy. In 1989, he completed a four-year degree in biological sciences at the University of Bologna, presenting a thesis on the migration of waders. He participated in expeditions to count and ring waders in wetlands such as the Lagoon of Venice and the Po Delta in Italy, the Gulf of Gabes in Tunisia, and the Sivash in Ukraine. In 1996, he was awarded a bursary by the Consiglio Nazionale per le Ricerche to study at the University of Cape Town's Avian Demography Unit. Upon his return to Italy he was appointed to a research position at the Istituto per la Fauna Selvatica in Bologna, where he proceeded with his PhD research.

Lorenzo Serra's thesis deals with the migration of the Grey Plover Pluvialis squatarola a wader that breeds in the tundra during short arctic summers and has a cosmopolitan distribution for the remainder of the year. The biometrics, primary moult and seasonal variation of body weight of seven populations (Britain, Italy, Kenya, South Africa, India and northwestern and southeastern Australia) were analysed, and the breeding origins and migratory patterns of the species described. Effort was made to elucidate the time constraints that act on the migratory system of the Grey Plover, Lorenzo trying to disentangle the tight network of ecological, metabolic and energetic requirements which are at the basis of life-history decisions. The theoretical background to the analysis of primary moult was provided by a statistical model developed in the Avian Demography Unit. The moult model was used on individual primary feathers, and this provided new perspectives on the moulting process. Lorenzo showed for the first time that Grey Plovers, and hence birds, are able to regulate the speed of primary moult by varying the number of simultaneously growing feathers and the growth rates of single feathers, suggesting that moulting is a flexible process. A slower growth rate resulted in more durable primaries; in other words, feathers that are grown at a leisurely pace are of superior quality.

Supervisor: Prof LG Underhill (Statistical Sciences)

Philip Anthony Whittington, BSc(Hons)(Lond)

Thesis Title: Survival and movements of African Penguins, especially after oiling

Phil Whittington was born and raised in north-west London, developing a passion for wildlife and birds at an early age. After attaining a BSc in biological sciences at London University in 1980, he worked as an ornithologist with the British Trust for Ornithology. Between 1991 and 1993, he travelled extensively in south-east Asia and Australia. He then undertook faunal surveys in the mountains of north-western Pakistan, before coming to Cape Town to take up his doctoral research on the African Penguin.

Phil Whittington's thesis, on the survival and movements of African Penguins, was based on the collection and analysis of an extensive data set, resulting from re-sightings of thousands of flipper-banded penguins. The fieldwork involved visits to 17 of the 18 penguin breeding colonies on the coast of South Africa. The analysis confirmed that African Penguins travel extensively in their first few years of life and that they forage and moult in areas away from their breeding colonies. The study found that 2% of those penguins that had been banded as chicks, and were subsequently re-sighted, had emigrated, while 14% were known to have returned to breed at their natal colonies. African Penguins were found to breed for the first time when 4-5 years old. The research establishes that the long-term survival of African Penguins, which have been oiled, cleaned and rehabilitated back to the wild, does not differ from that of penguins that have never been oiled. This confirms that rehabilitation of oiled African Penguins is worthwhile and makes an important contribution to the conservation of the species. The thesis provides the first evidence that hand-reared African Penguin chicks, orphaned as a result of oil spills, survive as well in the wild as chicks that were reared and fledged naturally.

Supervisors: Prof LG Underhill (Statistical Sciences)
                    Dr RJM Crawford (Marine & Coastal Management)

Written and photographed by John Cooper