His future is in your hands
 Sandra Hervias
His future is in your hands.
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This is a Cory's Shearwater Calonectris diomedea raised on the island of Corvo, Azores, one of the largest seabird colonies in the Atlantic. His parents will spend six months wandering the ocean in the face of strong winds and storms to find enough food to keep him alive. This is the only chick they will have this year.
When he fledges he will start foraging for himself along the Atlantic coasts of Africa and South America. But like thousands of other seabirds, he will be heading into terrible danger.
The bait on longline fishing hooks is a tempting meal for hungry seabirds like this, but when they grab it, they are snared, dragged underwater and drowned.
BirdLife estimate's that more than 200,000 seabirds die each year in longline and other fishing gear in the Atlantic and in other EU waters.
We already know how to stop this, but we need your help. There are many simple, inexpensive measures that fishing boats can take to prevent seabirds becoming hooked or entangled in nets. These measures also mean that longline boats waste less bait, and take a bigger, more valuable, catch of fish. We just need an EU action plan for seabirds which includes the changes in legislation needed to make sure these measures become routinely used by EU fishing fleets wherever they operate, in home waters or further afield where albatrosses also roam.
Sign here now and ask the new European Commissioner for Fisheries, Maria Damanaki, to take strong and urgent action to save our seabirds and make fisheries environmentally-friendly.
This would save the lives of thousands of seabirds, including many species of albatross that are on the verge of extinction.
Dear Maria Damanaki, I am signing this BirdLife pledge in the hope that you will stop the needless slaughter of seabirds by:
- Adopting without delay the EU Seabird Action Plan
- Changing the Technical Measures Regulation legislation and to introduce obligatory use of seabird mitigation measures in problem fisheries
- Changing the Data Collection Regulation legislation and to introduce obligatory collection and reporting of seabird bycatch data.
Thank you.