Bringing them back - Saving the Kermadec petrel.

Kermadec petrel is a medium-sized what we call gadfly petrel, about as heavy as your usual chook. It's vulnerable in Australia because it only breeds on two sites within Australasia, that's Bulls Pyramid which is 23km from Lord Howe Island in New South Wales and on the territory of Norfolk Island on Phillip Island which is 6km off the main island. But the numbers are very small, probably less than or around 100 pairs all up. Well unlike most other petrels, the Kermadec petrel actually nests straight on the ground so that makes it really vulnerable to predation. They actually did used to occur on the mainland of Lord Howe Island as well but unfortunately pigs, rats and cats were all introduced early on and by the 1920s the petrels had been completely wiped out through predation. The New South Wales Government is working to bring the Kermadec petrel back to Lord Howe Island 100 years after it was wiped out. Now that the rodent eradication project has been successfully carried out, the island is free of rats and mice and so seabirds like this can safely return again. And now their biggest predator that remains is the Lord Howe wood hen. So to try to keep them safe from predation in these early stages of potential reintroduction, we've developed a special wooden alcove nest shelter. So it was important for us to test out the nest shelters to see if Kermadec petrels would actually use them for breeding. We installed them in an area of existing Kermadec petrel habitat on Phillip Island off Norfolk Island and at this site the petrels are subject to predation by a similar sized bird to the wood hen which is the purple swamp hen. The artificial habitat that we've created on Phillip was experimental. We had to create something that mimicked the landscapes in which they were breeding. So we knew because they're a surface nesting bird they required a solid background behind them and we mimicked that by using cross-hatched timber with a semi-covered top made of acetonite. So we created a wire mesh and wove camouflage material through it and that created an artificial bush and the beauty for the Kermadec petrel is when they used the alcove for breeding in, their chicks weren't directly in front of the entrances to the alcove. So any predatory bird looking in couldn't see the chick. We've found that most of these shelters have now been investigated by Kermadec petrels and around 12 nests have established since the beginning of the trial and we've had around 80% of nesting attempts successfully raise a chick to fledging. So the results of our trials on Phillip Island have shown that our nest shelters can effectively reduce predation risk for Kermadec petrels and this gives us hope for our Lord Howe Island site where we've also installed these same nesting shelters. We've installed three speaker systems on Lord Howe Island in areas of potentially suitable Kermadec petrel habitat and we've got the species calls playing via this loudspeaker every night for several hours a night. The idea being to hopefully attract any birds flying past to come down and explore and hopefully eventually find a new place to nest. So if the Kermadec petrel is successfully re-established on Lord Howe Island it'll be a huge win for conservation. You know they would have been there for potentially tens of thousands of years and have only been gone for the last 100 years due to human activity. So it would be incredible if we can bring it back again to take its rightful place among the biodiversity of the island.