National Geographic

this happen. No one is out on the cold, choppywater except the trawler’s crew. Even if the crewhad time to be looking, the bird has disappearedin the blink of an eye, and its dead body won’tfloat to the surface until the ship has moved on.Every year, thousands of albatrosses are killedinvisibly by trawlers. Tens of thousands more dieon the hooks of longline fishing vessels, alongwith even greater numbers of petrels and shear-waters. Accidental death in the world’s fisher-ies is one of the two most grievous threats thatseabirds face, and it’s a tough one to address,because deepwater fishing boats typically oper-ate under intense financial pressure and mini-mal oversight. Only a few countries seriouslyregulate their fleets’ seabird bycatch.In one of those countries, South Africa, I meta successful longline tuna-boat captain namedDeon van Antwerpen. With me, at a small har-bor in Cape Town, was Ross Wanless, a biologistwho manages the seabird conservation programof BirdLife South Africa. Wanless had come tothe harbor to hear about the problems that vanAntwerpen was having with the government’sseabird regulations. Van Antwerpen, a beefyand voluble man, gestured unhappily towarda basket of pale green fishing-line weights atthe back of his vessel.“We’ve lost 3,000 ofthese things,” he said.Longline fishing killsalbatrosses diferentlythan trawling does. Asmaller seabird divesdown and brings abaited hook to the sur-face and tries to pullthe bait off, and thenan albatross barges inand swallows the wholething, hooking itselfand drowning. Onesolution is to weightthe line, so that thebaited hook quickly sinks out of reach of the birds.But a bare metal sinker can become a bullet to acrew member’s forehead when a hundred- poundtuna is hauled in and the line recoils. BirdLife rec-ommends sinkers with a loosely attached casingof luminescent plastic (light attracts fish), and vanAntwerpen had been eager to try them on his ves-sel. “Every bird I catch,” he said to Wanless, “ispotentially a fish I didn’t catch. But you need toEvery year,thousands ofalbatrossesare killedby trawlers.Thousandsmore die onthe hooksof longlinefishing vessels.get legislation that’s practical. If you don’t, thenmost guys will just ignore it.”There ensued an intricate discussion betweenan exceptionally conscientious boat owner and aconservationist whose goal is to bring bird-safemethods to the entire world’s deep-sea fishingfleet. Van Antwerpen’s chief complaint with theplastic sinkers was that BirdLife wanted themtoo close to the baited hook—“if a shark snapsthe line, we lose the sinker.” Would it be OK ifhe increased the separation between sinkerand hook to four meters? Wanless frowned andpointed out that this would make the hook sinktoo slowly to protect seabirds. But maybe increas-ing the weight of the sinker would compensatefor a greater separation? Van Antwerpen said he’dbe happy to do the experiment—he really didn’twant to catch albatrosses. He just wanted to catchtuna without losing all his sinkers.Fishing vessels can further reduce seabirdbycatch by dragging a “bird scaring” line, whichconsists of a brightly tasseled rope with a plas-tic cone at the end of it. They’re inexpensive,easy to use, and highly efective at keeping birdsout of a vessel’s wake. A trawler, by using onlya bird-scaring line, can reduce the number ofalbatrosses it kills by as much as 99 percent.Because a longline vessel’s hooks remain close tothe surface beyond the bird-scaring line, SouthAfrica requires it to take one additional protec-tive measure, either weighting its lines or settingthem after dark, when the birds are less activeand can’t see the bait.Wanless and his wife, Andrea Angel, who is theleader of BirdLife South Africa’s Albatross TaskForce, have been working with South Africa’s gov-ernment and fishing fleet for more than a decade.Any commercial vessel fishing in South Africanwaters now has to practice seabird bycatch mit-igation, and Wanless and Angel are attemptingto forge relationships with every longline tunaskipper. “The way to achieve something,” Wan-less told me, “is not to present a fancy technicalsolution but to engage with human beings.” As aresult of his team’s eforts, the annual toll on sea-birds in South Africa has fallen from an estimated35,000 in 1996 to as few as 500 today.But protecting seabirds takes more than regu-lations. It also requires independent monitoringof fishing vessels and, ideally, a financial incen-tive for the industry to reduce seabird bycatch.Although long-liners have one straightforwardreason to catch fewer birds—“They’d rather catch130 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC