Cory's shearwater S.O.S

Less than 100 years ago was common hunting hundreds of Cory's Shearwater for different uses in Corvo Island.
At such hard time, hunger forced people to seek alternative food, for example, "Erva do Calhau" (an algae) and "Saramago" (an herb), because they could not cultivate the land during the winter due heavy storms.
The Cory's shearwater were also a food supplement for some people who were forced to learn some biological aspects of this species, such as hatching dates, that allowed to pick up eggs, and the period in which chicks had less fat and more meat. They also learned how to extract the oil from these birds to spread after their tools. Even serving as bait in the local fishery.

Sandra

Two British experts visit Corvo Island

Kevin and Ruth Standring are experts in drafting and designing touristic trails and routes for hikers.
Their mission is to analyze the feasibility of installing four hiking trails for the tourist who visit the island.

The Cory's shearwater activity: dataloggers

Logger work is not knew for SPEA and in the scope of the Marine IBA Life project we have used several troughout the islands of Azores, Madeira and in the Mainland. SPEA is currently working with Coimbra University in yet another project to identify with more detail the foraging areas of Cory's shearwaters and what may influence them. In these videos we can witness the deployment of small GPS devices that can last longer than 15 days and that will be essential for Filipe Ceia to know these seabird movements at sea for his Phd thesis.

Biological reserves creation

The project's goal is to create two reserves with optimal conditions for seabirds nesting. Our aims are to restore their natural ecosystem and we pretend to remove all the exotic species, and create the first endemic forest.

Monitoring activities in Vila Franca islet

Testing eradication of exotic rodents

Two different methods for the eradication of exotic rodents were being tested on Corvo Island.

The first Cory's shearwater chick leaves the nest!!

Last week we started to ring, to weight and to collect samples of Cory's shearwater chicks that are almost ready to leave the nests.


Most chicks are fully grown and almost fledging, and last Thursday night we rescued the first in Corvo Village, that was released at sea the next morning.
SOS Cagarro campaign is starting to have some busy periods and the volunteers should be ready in the next few days because the peak of the fledging season is about to occur, now that the chicks are getting ready to go to the sea.

Regional Government of Azores visited Corvo island

The Regional Government of Azores realized the annually visit to occidental group.

Cory's shearwater breeding success

To understand how the Cory's Shearwater population of Corvo is evolving over the years, we are monitoring six different sub-colonies aiming to estimate their breeding success.

Corvo receives lots of visitors...

Last week the Scientific comission visited Corvo Islands and evaluated the project actions. During the meeting it was discussed in what way the methods used can be improved and how we should proceed to the data treatment.

The visits were very profitable and resulted in various valuable sugestions and ideas to improve the project actions. We managed to visit all the project intervention areas, although the winter days are coming. In between rain and strong winds we were lucky enough to catch some sunny moments to visit the altitude reserve and show the "Caldeirão" to the Comission.


Beside the project team, the meeting counted with the presence of Jaime Ramos (University of Coimbra), Manuel Nogales (CSIC), Steffen Oppel (RSPB), Raquel Ferreira (SRAM) and Joaquim Teodósio (SPEA).

On Monday the strong wind forecast made us fear the worst, but finally the plane managed to land and all our visitors departed. We hope that they manage to come back soon enough and to help us again.

Abundance estimate of rodents on Cory's shearwater colonies

Every month the team sets up a trap grid for rats and mice at the Cory's shearwater colonies. trough this capture/recapture method we can monitor the population of rodents and know their densities and home ranges.

Wild cats detection with surveillance cameras

The project has 17 surveillance cameras that are used to analyze the variation in the abundance of wild cats among different colonies.
Every two weeks a technician visits the colonies to check and move each camera to a new capture point.

European Commission visits our project!

Last week, three representatives of the European Commission came to Corvo to check the progress and the work done on all the areas on the scope of the LIFE project.
The visit went smoothly and the commission was pleases with the progress of the actions.
Several people attended this formal visit and related meetings, nominately the SPEA team and representatives from all the partner institutions: Frederico Cardigos (Regional Director of Environment), Jorge Cardoso (Island Nature Park Director), Manuel Rita (Mayor of Corvo), Luis Costa (SPEA Executive Director), Iván Ramírez (European Marine Program Coordinator), José Pedro Tavares (RSPB), Pedro Luis Geraldes, Sandra Hervias, Nuno Oliveira and Carlos Silva (project team).
Last night the third project public meeting took place in the Santa Casa da Misericórdia opened to the general public. The session was opened by the Regional Director of Environment and the Executive Director of SPEA, and was we had the nice surprise to see that we had an audience of around 80 persons.

The peddy paper was a great success!!

One week ago, we organize a Peddy paper with the youth of Corvo. We show them how is the daily work of the team.
Children and technicians enjoyed the activities in each point, such as: using GPS to recover wax blocks used to track rodents, identification of endemic, native and exotic plants that are growing on Corvo, and visit a Cory's shearwater colony, among other things...
This week we will post a little video with such activities.
Don't miss it!!!

Cory's shearwater nest monitoring

We monitored 240 nests in a weekly basis since the begginning of May. Out of those 180 were occupied and we had 125 eggs layed. Since hatching predation of chicks by cats and rats has been high and only about 65% of the birds survived so far, with at least a month to go still for fledging.

To detect predators we deployed some motion sensor triggered cameras

Pedro