Testimonjanzi tal-Volontarji
EIGHT DAYS ON A SICILIAN TRAWLER ROUND MALTA To say this was ‘quite an experience’ would be an understatement! Between 15 – 23 July 2007 I joined the Sicilian trawler Santa Anna, which had been commissioned by the Maltese Centre for Fisheries Sciences to carry out research trawls around the Maltese islands. I was there to count shearwaters, and in particular the Yelkouan Shearwater (Puffinus yelkouan). It breeds in important numbers in Malta and is the subject of a ground-breaking conservation project by BirdLife Malta, the EU LIFE Yelkouan Shearwater Project. I like to think of it as the ‘Maltese Shearwater’.
The days began about 6am when the trawl net was played out behind the boat for the first time. The heavy trawl boards clanked and the winches whined as hundreds of metres of steel cable were unwound to allow the net to reach the Mediterranean seabed. Then the net was slowly dragged along the bottom for half an hour or an hour, during which time I recorded the seabirds present around the boat. Then the boat stopped and the net was slowly wound back in and hauled over the side. Even after eight days of trawling four or five times a day the contents still shocked me. Relatively few fish – edible ones at least – an incredible amount of discarded plastic fishing nets, and rubbish ranging from oil drums to pieces of machinery and wartime ammunition. Considering that each trawl was only 22 metres wide, and we trawled right across Malta’s territorial waters, the fact that we always dredged up rubbish like this showed that almost the whole seabed is now a vast rubbish dump.
But what of the birds? As we sailed up the west coasts of Malta and Gozo there were good numbers of the larger Cory’s Shearwater, especially in the early morning. This is not surprising as they were still providing nightly feeds for their young when we passed, and some of their largest colonies are along this coast. Then, as we rounded the north-west of Gozo, sometimes far enough out to see the lights of Sicily at night, we began to see Storm Petrels dancing in our wake. These delightful little birds, smaller than swallows, feed in the same way as shearwaters from fish near the surface of the sea. They get their name from the fact that, in northern European waters, they are often seen when stormy weather brings fish shoals nearer the surface.
No storms around Malta in July however, only blazing 40 deg sunshine every day, usually with a welcome breeze across the sea. It was not until we were east of Malta that we saw our first Yelkouan shearwaters, skimming in to join the scavenging Cory’s behind the trawler as fish were discarded. But we must not have been in their main feeding area because we only saw them on two days out of eight at sea, and only two each day! They finish nesting earlier than the Cory’s and presumably go further offshore from Malta to feed with their young. And they are of course much less numerous than Cory’s.
So then it was back to Valetta, to moor in the magnificent Grand Harbour and seek out cooler places in which to recover my ‘land legs’!
David Minns
July 2007