Meet the ecologist spreading her wings in New Zealand to save seabirds
"You can't expect to save a whole species in a month. Don't give up. We need to keep fighting. The alternative is to just let it all crumble. We can't do that."
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00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:02 I never thought I would be standing on a cliff,
00:05 poking my hand into burrows and pulling birds out of it,
00:08 for sure.
00:11 But I've always had this idea that my work
00:13 would be quite adventurous, interesting, and dynamic.
00:15 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:18 I have field work, but I'm also in front of the computer.
00:21 It's very fulfilling and very intellectually stimulating.
00:27 I feel really lucky.
00:28 Not many people can say that they've had that chance
00:30 to take their results and make a difference.
00:33 My name is Maida Fessardi.
00:34 I'm a seabird ecologist.
00:36 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:55 Seabirds are the most threatened group of birds in the world.
00:59 But great-faced petrels are pretty special,
01:02 because they are one of the only seabird species in New Zealand
01:05 that's still living in mainland.
01:08 They are actually doing relatively well,
01:10 compared to all the other seabirds.
01:12 They are one of the only species of seabirds in New Zealand
01:15 that are not threatened.
01:16 We want to find out why they're doing so well,
01:18 even though other birds are not.
01:21 We know the kind of habitat the seabirds like to nest,
01:25 and we're going to go into this habitat.
01:29 I grab the bird from the burrow and do a visual health check.
01:33 I do just general measurements.
01:35 So I weigh them and measure the part of their leg,
01:38 wing length as well.
01:41 We ID them to make sure that we can check them yearly.
01:44 After I finish all of that, I will put the birds back
01:47 into the burrow, hopefully use that information
01:50 to restore seabird populations.
01:52 We have to be careful.
02:04 We just need to minimize stress to those birds.
02:06 We're doing it for them, but we also
02:09 can't add to the threats that they're facing.
02:11 So we need to be respectful of it.
02:15 Maida and I have been working on a number of projects
02:19 that they're all seabird-based.
02:21 I've been a mentor with Maida pretty much from the start.
02:24 She was one of our summer students in our program.
02:30 She eventually would do a master's.
02:33 When I was doing my thesis, I was
02:35 looking at feather brightness as a monitoring tool.
02:39 That got incorporated into the Auckland Council Seabird
02:41 Monitoring Program.
02:43 So that was a huge milestone to me, to finish my master's
02:46 and start this job at council doing seabird monitoring.
02:50 We can actually tell a lot by just looking at a feather.
02:59 The spectrometer measures the reflectance
03:02 on feather pigmentation.
03:04 Just like us with our hair and our nails,
03:07 if they have good feathers with bright colors,
03:09 that means that they're probably doing well.
03:12 If they ingest heavy metal contaminants,
03:14 while they are growing feathers, that's
03:16 deposited in their feathers.
03:19 We can measure how much contaminants they've
03:22 been ingesting in their diet.
03:24 And they can tell us if that's a threat for the population
03:26 or if the area they are foraging is contaminated.
03:30 All this data that we are collecting
03:32 and all this information that we're gathering,
03:34 one day will be applied into management.
03:39 We spend a lot of time planning and strategizing
03:42 development of programs and the next steps.
03:44 Seabirds tend to breed along the coastlines
03:47 where the most desirable property is for humans.
03:50 So there's habitat loss that has occurred.
03:54 The wooden boxes are important because sometimes there's
03:56 quite a bit of competition between seabirds
03:58 for prime habitat.
04:00 They end up not breeding because they don't find it.
04:02 So the wooden boxes mimic the natural environment
04:04 of the burrow.
04:05 They will attract more birds to areas
04:07 that we're trying to repopulate.
04:09 Seabirds were perfect because they just
04:11 joined all my worlds together, both geographically
04:15 but also ecologically.
04:17 It really resonated with me and what
04:19 I wanted to do with my life.
04:20 The first thing that attracted me to seabirds
04:26 was to hear immigrants like me.
04:29 I was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
04:31 I was born in the United States.
04:33 I was born in the United States.
04:34 I was born in the United States.
04:35 I was born in the United States.
04:37 I was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
04:39 And I live in Auckland, New Zealand.
04:41 They breed in New Zealand, but they go all the way
04:43 to South America, for example.
04:45 That attracted me because I wanted to be able to work here
04:47 but also have an impact on where I come from.
04:50 It can be quite challenging.
04:59 There's a lot of weight bearing and some days of hiking.
05:03 It's 12 hours hiking, very tough terrains.
05:08 We go to some very interesting places.
05:10 It's a wonderful world to interact with it,
05:12 but it's also a lot of hard work.
05:16 There's a lot of negativity around conservation right now.
05:21 It can be quite depressing.
05:25 You can't be expecting to save a whole species in a month.
05:31 Don't give up.
05:32 We need to keep fighting.
05:34 The alternative is to just let it all crumble.
05:40 We can't do that.
05:41 I want to keep doing this work.
05:44 There's still an opportunity to make a difference here.
05:47 We can still save species.
05:50 [MUSIC PLAYING]
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05:58 (upbeat music)
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