We can learn several lessons from that experience. One is that we can do great damage to seabird populations in a very short time if we do things that cause substantial adult mortality. A second is that seabird populations can recover well with protection and modest management—although most of them, being slow breeders, recover slowly. A third lesson is that in the last 30 years we have caused substantial damage through oil spills, human disturbance at the breeding colonies, chemical pollution, and indirectly by promoting the spread of gulls. Much has been said at the conference about these present-day human impacts. However, with the sole exception of the oil spills which have affected alcids and sea ducks in parts of northwest Europe, it seems to me that the damage caused by human activity in the past 30 years is considerably less than that in the last 30 years of the 19th century.
Another lesson we can learn from the recent experience in other areas is that it is possible to ameliorate some of these adverse human impacts with local, small-scale, and even rather amateurish management activities—for example, protecting seabird colonies from gulls, regulating human visits, and controlling the use of the most toxic chemicals. Our most conspicuous failure is in controlling oil pollution. Although safety precautions imposed on offshore drilling rigs and at shipping terminals have proved reasonably effective in averting major damage to seabirds, attempts to control oil pollution during transportation have been essentially fruitless. Tanker accidents and deliberate discharges from vessels remain the major threat to seabird populations.
Another lesson from other areas is that public education has been very effective in putting pressure behind conservation measures, and is doing so increasingly. At the same time, however, it is resulting in an increase of the disturbances that the birds suffer at their breeding grounds from casual visitors, photographers, and sometimes, well-meaning naturalists.
Finally, in very recent years, there have been encouraging developments in rehabilitating oiled birds, captive breeding, and reintroduction into areas from which they have been depleted. Restoration of seabird populations no longer seems an impossible goal.
Conservation Needs for North Pacific Seabirds
We now know enough about the seabirds of the northern North Pacific to specify in principle what should be done immediately to conserve them. I will not address the institutional arrangements needed for conservation; R. E. LeResche's paper presented a very clear picture of the institutional problems involved in protecting and managing seabirds on an interregional and international basis. I will simply endorse his principal recommendation: that we should try to bring the various responsible agencies together to formulate comprehensive management plans.
On the level at which we as individuals and as a group of biologists can work, we can already make some positive recommendations. The most important is that since prevention of damage is a lot better than cure, measures to avert damage should have the highest priority. We have heard a great deal from the oil industry about the "inevitability" of accidents. One speaker mentioned the "inherent fallibility of man." Well, we are all fallible, but the experience of the last 50 years is that some people are more fallible than others. No oil company has a perfect record, but some have 10 times as many accidents as the best, and some, I believe, have considerably more than 10 times as many. This means, very simply, that it is possible to eliminate most—not all, but most—of the major threats to the seabirds, merely by upgrading the safety performance of the entire industry to that already achieved by its best segments. I suggest that our major challenge in the coming years is to work for effective regulation of the industry: to achieve regulations which will decisively penalize bad performance and as decisively reward care.
Perhaps the second priority in conservation is to protect and manage the existing breeding colonies. In most cases protection is legally feasible if we have the will. Most of the major colonies are in remote areas or in public ownership where development and disturbance can be controlled. Management of the breeding populations is less straightforward, however, because we do not know enough about the functioning of this complex biological resource. Seabird populations fluctuate and they have a very long response time, the environment is not constant, we do not understand the dynamics of multispecies communities, and we do not know how they respond either to external changes or to our attempts to manage them. Management will have to be improvisatory for a very long time. We must recognize that effective conservation of a bird population with a 20-year generation time will take at least 20 years to show results.
Another priority task is to control predators. I have been impressed by the evidence we have for major effects of predators on the seabird populations here. I would regard control of predators and management of habitats on some of the major seabird islands as an extremely urgent task.
A longer-term but no less important program is public education. This program has several important aspects: one is to increase public support for political actions and effective regulations to protect seabirds; another is to educate the public about the vulnerability of seabirds and to prevent disturbance or deliberate human destruction.