A British wildlife advocate hopes to use the Bermuda cahow to help save seabirds worldwide.

Bruce Pearson, who is on the Island to sketch cahows, will discuss his efforts to protect the noted petrel at BUEI tonight.

He hopes to use his drawings to raise awareness of the plight of albatrosses and petrels, whose populations have plunged over the past 30 years due to long line fishing and industrial trawling.

“The key issue for the cahow is that the places they need to nest to grow their populations are threatened by rats and human pressure on the land,” Mr Pearson said.

“Even if I see a dot in the distance I shall be happy. I would love to sit on a moving boat and do some drawing, so I can think about how I can help people in Bermuda tell the story of the cahow.”

The cahow was thought extinct after early settlers in Bermuda ate most of them in the 1600s. A small population was rediscovered in the 1950s.

Since then, environmentalists like former government conservation officer David Wingate have nursed the population back to strength by protecting their nesting sites. Unfortunately, the population is still vulnerable to human interference and the rats that eat their eggs.

Mr Pearson first fell in love with seabirds 40 years ago, while working as a research assistant helping to ring sea birds for sea bird studies.

“I was just out of art school,” he said. “I had inherited a passion for birdwatching from my father. While I was in South Georgia on Bird Island, I was drawing, drawing all the time, in a place where you could walk up to any number of albatrosses or penguins. There were whales all around, and icebergs just offshore.”

He now lives in Cambridge, England. Recently, he went back to South Georgia as a guest on a ship and found that much had changed. In the last four decades 19 out of the 21 species of albatross in the world had become threatened with extinction. The biggest one, the wandering albatross, had become critically endangered. The wandering albatross graces the cover of his book Troubled Waters: Trailing the Albatross: An Artist’s Journey.

“The graph had only just started to dip when I left South Georgia, the first time,” he said. “Since then albatross and petrel populations have gone down and down.”

In the early 1980s 100,000 albatrosses were hooked on long lines each year. The birds go for the baited hooks as the lines are thrown overboard.

“There were numerous international agreements between countries done to try to stop this,” he said.

“We also worked with the fishing boats. No fisherman wants a bird on a hook; they want fish. Sometimes simple things will help, like setting lines and nets at night to make it more difficult for the birds to see the bait. The population plummet has now slowed, but the numbers aren’t coming up again.”

He decided that the next phase of his life would involve trying to help these birds.

Mr Pearson went out on a longline fishing boat to witness what was happening for himself, and sketched. Images from this trip can be seen in Troubled Waters.

“So much of what happens to these birds happens out at sea out of sight of most people,” he said.

Tonight Mr Pearson will discuss “some lovely links” between Bermuda and South Georgia.

“They are worlds apart, but the two places share the same ocean, and wildlife knows no boundaries,” he said. “The issues that affect those down south are affecting people in the northern hemisphere as well. Solutions are the same — restoring habitat, removing predation and make a conservation effort at sea through treaties on what we do with the ocean.”

The talk takes place at 7.30pm in the Tradewinds Auditorium. Tickets, $20 for members and $25 for non-members, are available by calling 294-020.

For more information see www.brucepearson.net.