What we know about the mysterious slaughter of seabirds on the Atlantic coast

Sea Shepherd, an NGO defending oceans and biodiversity, announced Monday that it had recorded more than a hundred corpses of seabirds on the beaches of Vendée alone.

A worrying situation. The ocean protection organization Sea Shepherd has recorded more than a hundred corpses of seabirds on the beaches of Vendée over the last five weeks, it announced in a press release published Monday February 26. The NGO claims that its care center in Brittany has also recovered numerous guillemots, a bird from the penguin family, “malnourished, exhausted and hypothermic”. Franceinfo summarizes what we know about this alarming phenomenon.

The west coast coastlines affected

“The phenomenon is not limited to Vendée and extends to Brittany and the English Channel”, specifies Sea Shepherd on its site. The NGO, however, specifies that it has “counted more than 130 corpses of guillemots on a single portion of 120 km beaches”, in Vendee. Another figure, this time coming from the League for the Protection of Birds (LPO): on the west coast of France, volunteers reported “nearly 250 stranded guillemots”. The phenomenon seems to have accelerated in recent weeks, since 172 birds have been counted since the beginning of February, again according to the LPO.

Several teams of caregivers mobilized

Patrolling the beaches, counting corpses, treating seabirds in distress, releasing them, euthanizing them, carrying out prevention, studying the causes of death… The phenomenon requires a network of volunteers and the presence of specialists in the field . Sea Shepherd reports teams that “take turns seven days a week” and who welcomed 28 guillemots into their centers. On Tuesday, 11 of them were released.

To facilitate the work of the keepers and not aggravate the situation, the LPO draws up a list of actions to adopt for walkers who notice the stranding of a bird. Among the recommendations is that of not handling the carcass if the guillemot is dead. Otherwise, it is important to wear gloves and keep the animal’s wings glued to its body, as well as its head hidden. Another tip: isolate it in a quiet place, after placing it in a box.

Causes of mortality to be determined

For the moment, no association is able to establish with certainty the reasons for these strandings on French beaches. The LPO argues that “bird flu does not seem to be involved”. She nevertheless declares to place the guillemots in quarantine in her centers “in order to avoid any possible contamination”. Among the 85 live birds she collected, she noted similar symptoms, namely “hypothermia and worrying thinness”. Same diagnosis on the Sea Shepherd side: “All have lost more than 25% of their weight and are hypothermic with a temperature 3° lower than their normal temperature”we can read in Monday’s press release.

The press release then mentions several possibilities: the one which is the most probable “is the scarcity of food”due to the “overfishing, climate change or a combination of the two”. Another hypothesis: capture, to the extent that “netters less than 8 meters long are fully capable of catching birds close to the coast”. The NGO, however, tempers this second option, arguing that “boats over 8 meters have been stopped over the past period”, Fishing bans from January 22 to February 20. To determine the causes of death, she says there is no other choice than to carry out autopsies in large numbers.

A situation which is not unprecedented

While Sea Shepherd evokes a phenomenon “unprecedented” in its press release, the French Biodiversity Office (OFB) appears less alarmist. In an article in Reporterre, the public establishment recalls that a much larger stranding took place during the winter of 2014 on the Atlantic coast, due to a succession of storms. From January to March 2014, more than 40,000 seabirds were found on the coasts, “from the department of Pyrénées-Atlantiques to that of Finistère”according to a report from the LPO (PDF).