Endangered seabird spotted on Pacific Island after disappearing for a Century

An endangered seabird has been sighted on the island of Kamaka after disappearing from the native home for more than 100 years.

According to reports on 2 January, the Polynesian storm-petrels returned after years of extensive effort to restore and re-wild Kamaka, a tiny French Polynesian island found in the south of the Pacific Ocean.

The restoration efforts

The birds had disappeared from the island mainly because of invasive rat species that drove them away since they are ground-nesting birds.

The rodents easily preyed on the eggs and flightless young of the birds, resulting in their disappearance and the shrinking of their habitat.

As part of efforts to bring them back, the rodents were removed from the island in 2022 using drone technology.

By recording the sounds of a storm-petrel colony on a nearby island and playing them on the Kamaka island 9a technique known as social attraction), they were able to coax the birds back to their former home.

The team installed four live-in burrows and motion-sensing cameras with two solar-powered sound systems to broadcast the recorded sounds in March 2024, just before their breeding season.

The first storm-petrel was sighted on the island just one month after the installations, and multiple birds were spotted in the burrows by June.

Thomas Ghestemme from SOP MANU, one of the organizations involved in the project, in a statement said:

“The results of our social attraction efforts were quickly apparent – Polynesian storm-petrels began visiting at the start of the nesting season and became regular visitors, while also spending time in the nest boxes,”

It is estimated that only 250 t0 1,000 storm-petrels are left in the wild, hence the effort to restore habitat and population to set the species on the path of recovery in the near future.