The Balearic shearwater is the northern hemisphere's only critically endangered seabird.

Despite this, projects and campaigns aimed at understanding its decline are severely under-funded.

The major cause of decline in the Balearic shearwater is mortality due to by-catch and rat depredation at breeding colonies. We know this because of our long-term monitoring at the world's largest remaining colony on the Island of Mallorca. By visiting the colony each year, we assess survival rates of adults and fledglings. The picture is bleak, with only 85% of adults surviving each year. 85% is considerably lower than this normally long-lived species needs to achieve a stable population status. It is estimated that without action on bycatch the species will go extinct in ~60 years.

Our project combines the deployment of long-term tracking devices on shearwaters with systematic monitoring of the colony to look at their year-round behaviour, population trends and breeding success. Unfortunately, the colony is only accessible by boat, which presents our current challenge as our boat trailer has come to the end of its life.

By giving a small donation to help us buy a new boat trailer, you can help ensure that monitoring of this threatened species at its largest remaining colony will continue.

As the project gains political momentum, this will allow us to continue to visit difficult-to-access nesting sites for the species in order to monitor the demography of the species by-catch mitigation is put into place. That way, we can measure its impact on the population trends and ensure the species has a brighter future.

The boat trailer is a small, but absolutely crucial part of this chain. Balearic shearwaters need you!

The trailer at the start of this season's campaign.

Cover Photograph of Balearic shearwater copyright of Joe Pender, used with his kind permission.