Page 16 - Wildlife News December 2015
P. 16

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               To minimise the disruption caused by planned
               offshore wind farms, Alderney Wildlife Trust is
               tracking its gannets with GPS

david chapman  Aproject run by the Alderney                    One individual went as far as the middle     In years to come the project will study
                        Wildlife Trust, the British Trust for  of the North Sea, and another travelled      the effects of these installations on the
                        Ornithology and the University of      more than 500 miles in 36 hours.             behaviour and productivity of seabirds.
               Liverpool has shown the huge distances
               covered by Britain’s biggest seabird.             The Track A Gannet (TAG) project is the      “TAG increases our understanding of
                                                               first to provide real-time tracking of       how dependent seabirds are upon areas
                  Researchers attached tiny GPS devices        seabirds to the general public. It also has  proposed for development. After this
               to 26 northern gannets nesting on               a GannetCam, allowing views of the           year’s research has been assessed the
               Alderney this spring and summer. The            gannets’ breeding colony in season.          Trust plans to redesign and repeat the
               resulting signals showed the birds                                                           study in 2016,” said Roland Gauvain,
               foraging throughout the English Channel.          The Trust hopes the data will influence    Manager of the Alderney Wildlife Trust.
                                                               the planning of wind farms in the future.

               16 Wildlife news: national
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