Tag: Language: English

Winter is approaching, and lots of sea ducks that have bred further north will gather in the Lithuanian Baltic Sea. Before the colder period sets in, many Baltic Sea gillnet fishermen are focussed on catching plaice – when colder weather arrives, fishermen will switch to catching cod as they come closer to shore, and it is in this fishery that wintering birds are at risk of bycatch.

This is the critical time for our project, when months of preparation will come to fruition. Our collaborating fishermen are lined up, we have checked and tested our data collection protocols with them, and our observer team are ready to work with them to test net panels, which we hope will reduce seabird bycatch in gillnets.

The last steps are the production of our modified gillnets with net panels attached and the finalisation of special permissions from the Fisheries Service to conduct our trials. The materials are now ready, and we hope the net maker we are working with will have all 5,600m of these modified nets completed by the end of next week. The nest will be with modification of warning panels 60cm x60xm.

Similarly, the special permissions should be secured in the next fortnight. So, by mid-October, not long before most of the wintering seaducks have arrived, our fisherman will have the chance to test them in real life – some of the first fishermen in the world to work in this sort of trial!

This winter, 10 different fishermen will test our modified nets. Three of them will test nets in the open sea on big boats departing from Klaipeda port, and the remaining 7 will be departing from different areas of the coast with smaller vessels. In addition, the Fisheries Service is offering to help obtain further bird bycatch data from fisherman  not directly involved in our project. This will be supported by our recent engagement with gillnet fishermen at the Costal Fisheries Association annual meeting, where we were able to highlight the bird bycatch issue and encourage fishermen to provide us with records of bycaught birds. Although these ad-hoc reports from fishermen will not form the core basis of our data collection, they will help us build an overall picture of seaduck bycatch in Lithuania.

As summer arrived this year many diving seabirds migrated from the Baltic Sea to breeding grounds in Russian Siberia. But this is just a short period of their life, as they move to their breeding grounds for 4-5 months, and the rest of the year they spend on wintering ground.

The 2014/2015 winter period in the Baltic region was mild, and lots of diving birds stayed further north than usual, where ice-free water was present throughout the entire season. Our colleague Vytautas Eigirdas, in the Lithuanian Ornithological Society found that there were still significant number of wintering Velvet Scoters in the Lithuanian Baltic Sea along the coast of the Curonian Spit. Counts found at least 3500 of this species, which is currently considered endangered globally. During cold winters in the same area you can find more than 5000 wintering Velvet Scoters.

During the 2014/2015 winter we were able to assess the number of these diving birds caught in fishing nets in Lithuania. This is the first time in a number of years that we have been able to do this work. Together with project partners – the coastal fisherman- we collected data on seabird bycatch. Looking at the data collected from this preliminary work, 53 birds were recorded as caught in nets, the majority being Velvet Scoters – 45%, Long-tailed ducks were the second most regularly caught species – 39.6%, and there was also small numbers of Red-throated divers and Common guillemots caught.

For the most part, Velvet Scoters were caught near the Curonian Spit, in depths of 12-30 meters where the sea floor has a sandy bottom. These birds spend the winter in this type of habitat foraging on clams which inhabit the sandy bottom seafloor. In autumn this place is popular for the Cod fishery, which use 50-55mm mesh size nets. As fishermen use nets with big mesh sizes, this could affect the number of birds caught. Long-tailed ducks were mostly was caught near Palanga in water depths of 5-7 meters. In early spring time this region is popular with fishermen catching Smelt, and is also the stopover site for Long-tailed ducks. To catch smelts the fishermen use 18-22mm mesh size nets.

At this stage of our work, the data collected has been different compared to those collected 10-15 years ago, as the most regularly caught species is now Velvet Scoter, which was previously found to be the second most regularly caught species. Previously it was estimated that 2/3 of bycatch was from Long-tailed ducks, which no appears to no longer be the case. These changes could be related to changes of wintering sea ducks number in Baltics, or perhaps to the degradation of the feeding ground habitat. Now large numbers of Long-tailed ducks are common in the Lithuanian coast only during the spring migration. This demonstrates that knowing the key sites and timing of the birds movements and the fishing patterns and bycatch susceptibility in the Lithuanian Baltic sea will help us in trying to change the fishing gears to reduce seabird bycatch in nets.