The Ministry of agriculture and the environment has recently organized two workshops about development of sustainable marine fisheries and aquaculture in Slovenia. The workshops were held on 30th August and 2nd September in Izola and Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Yearly Archives: 2013
One of the factors of threat, that birds are nowadays facing, is also sea pollution. Due to leakage of oil and its derivatives, inappropriate handling of fuel as well as in cases of accidents at sea comes to the formation of oil slicks. Bird feathers can become oiled and thus reduces bird’s ability to fly away while birds can also be poisoned as they try to clean the oil from their feathers. Thankfully, to this problem is now devoting a lot of attention and experiences, how to act and help oiled birds are already known. One such organization that has as its mission solving such problems is, beside REMPEC, Sea Alarm Foundation and ISPRA, also the French organization CEDRE. From 21st to 23rd of May 2013 I had an opportunity to attend an international workshop in the frame of POSOW project focused on oiled wildlife response, shoreline cleanup and volunteer training.
On 19th April 2013 the Slovenian government declared a complemented Natura 2000 network which now includes the first marine sites in Slovenia with the Mediterranean shag as a qualifying species. The sites contain all three shags’ communal roosting sites on the buoys of maricultures and their nearest surroundings. They are situated in the bay of St. Bartholomew (SI5000028 Debeli rtič), the Strunjan bay (SI5000031 Strunjan) and the Piran bay (SI5000018 Sečoveljske soline).
BirdLife International submitted a joint position of 26 NGOs on the EU proposal for Directive on maritime spatial planning and integrated coastal management (MSF-ICM Directive).
They emphasize that the Directive should put environment at its heart. They warn that unless the decisions based on the Directive are made to ensure health of the environment and on the precautionary principle, the EU’s ’Blue Growth’ agenda will never be sustainable. In care of sea birds and entire marine environment in Slovenia and broader DOPPS – BirdLife Slovenia joins this common position.
Today, for the first time, the EU Fisheries Council discussed the EU Action Plan for reducing incidental catches of seabirds in EU fishing gears, which was proposed by the Commission in November 2012. The proposal of the action plan is a result of over a decade of efforts of BirdLife International and it represents a robust strategy to protect seabirds directly threatened by fisheries. Both, the Irish presidency and the MARE Commissioner, Maria Damanaki, expressed their strong support for the action plan today.
The port of Capodistria, Slovenia, is just hosting the Greenpeace ice-breaker Arctic Sunrise on her tour accross coastal seas of European union. She is sailing to support small-scale coastal fisheries and to point at damaging effects of the current Common Fisheries Policy that mainly supports unsustainable industrial fisheries with strong negative effect on fish stocks and marine ecosystems in general.
A telemetry workshop was held last weekend in the village of Wierzba in the north of Poland (Warmian-Masurian County), organized by the Polish company ECOTONE, one of the leading developers and producers of telemetry devices for wild animals, especially GPS loggers for birds. The workshop was attended also by two DOPPS – BirdLife Slovenia representatives, Katarina Denac and Urša Koce, to deepen our knowledge about telemetry which we implement on the Mediterranean Shag in the project SIMARINE-NATURA.
You are kindly invited to a presentation Birds summer at Slovenian sea as well which will be hold on 11th April 2013 in the Slovenian Natural History Museum in Ljubljana. At the presentation, which is a part of cycle Blue planet, we will introduce the Mediterranean Shag and the role of Slovenian sea and the project SIMARINE-NATURA for its conservation. Click here for more information. The presentation will be in Slovenian language but English discussion with project coordinator is possible.
In the beginning of last November we reported the death of the young shag Ari, the pioneer of telemetry research in the project SIMARINE-NATURA. The shag has died soon after it had been equipped with a GPS logger. Its body was found one day after its death (15th October 2012) in the dock of the Shipyard Izola. It was conspicuously undernourished. In order to find out the primary cause of the shag’s death we submitted the corpse to the autopsy at the Veterinary faculty of the Ljubljana University.
In the middle of December the shag Šime migrated to Croatia. It was roaming in Slovenian sea until 17th December. Its migration took two days. The first day it traveled along the Istrian coast and roosted on a small island nearby island Fenera by the cape Kamenjak. Next day it migrated further to the straits between islands Molat and Sestrunj in the Zadar archipelago where it has stayed since then. It roosts on two small islands and during the day it mostly roams by uninhabited coast at the NW of island Sestrunj.
It’s not known whether it is breeding there, but most probably not yet this year. Before migration it was not in breeding plumage yet, which is common for this time of the year for the sexually mature individuals.
Šime’s movements in November while it was still staying at slovenian sea were similar to those in October: it has been traveling between Debeli rtič and Strunjan and it has been roosting on the buoys of maricultures near Debeli rtič. Differently, it moved more to the south by the end of November, staying between Strunjan and Piran and roosting on the buoys of maricutures near Strunjan, from where it eventually departed to Croatia.