Marine life is suffering under the pressure of increasing human activities at sea.
It needs help.

How are your sea legs? The ocean is a harsh place to work. When you’re in your cabin, and the six-foot waves are throwing you all about, and the whole place reeks of dead fish, you long for home.

There is camaraderie with the fishing crew of course, but still the isolation and hardship is intense. I’ve just returned from a 90-day trip aboard a longline vessel out of Chile as part of the Albatross Task Force – saving albatrosses from a terrible fate.

Yes, the sea is harsh, but in moments of loneliness, when you see an albatross following the boat, so bright against the stormy sky, riding the updrafts from the waves with barely a wingflap, your spirits rise.

I dedicate my working life to saving marine life because I know how hard it is out there. The last thing that these creatures need is more danger from men in boats. Please help me and the rest of the team keep marine life off the hook...

Luis Cabezas.
Project Leader, Albatross Task Force, Chile.

seabird tracking.

photo of a seabird

To create a nature reserve at sea, you’ve got to know which areas of the sea are most important to wildlife, but how do you find that out? Seabirds and other marine life move about. The sea does not have the same geographical boundaries as land. Many seabirds travel far to forage, even small birds like kittiwakes can travel more than 200 km to find food.

We’re involved in FAME (Future of the Atlantic Marine Environment) – a huge international project to help inform the decision about where the new Marine Protected Areas will go. We’re using the very latest technology to track seabirds, and then comparing that information to oceanographic data – ocean currents, phytoplankton levels, wind patterns and temperature. For the first time, we’ll begin to understand where seabirds feed and why they feed there. This is the first step in protecting them.

saving albatrosses.

photo of fishermen

help stop albatross extinctions.
your £300 could buy three tori lines.

You wouldn’t think that something as simple as a ribbon of colourful bunting could save an albatross’s life, but it can. These “tori lines” warn seabirds away from the deadly baited hooks of longline fishing vessels – hooks that are killing tens of thousands of albatrosses every year.

Of the 22 albatross species, 17 are now threatened with extinction. But your support can save them.
As a pioneer supporting marine innovations, you will help fund the Albatross Task Force. These guys go out onto fishing boats in some of the roughest seas in the world to work with the fishermen and show them how to avoid catching albatrosses.

Tori lines are just one of the many innovative measures saving seabirds’ lives right now.

save henderson petrels.

photo of a henderson petrel
Become a pioneer

Eaten alive by rats. What an awful way to go. But this is the fate that meets Henderson petrel chicks, and it’s driving them to extinction.

Henderson Island is a UK Overseas Territory, and so it is our responsibility to do something to save them. This is one of the most remote places in the world – far out in the Pacific Ocean and 3,000 miles from the nearest continent. It is home to some stunning wildlife, including five species of bird that are found nowhere else on earth. But it is also home to Pacific rats – creatures that were accidentally introduced by man, and which are now devastating the island’s seabirds.

Within one week of hatching, 95% of petrel chicks are eaten alive by these rats – that’s over 25,000 chicks a year.

If we’re going to save Henderson petrels from extinction, all of the rats on the island have got to go. The scale of the job is massive, and it takes a specialist team to do it, but that’s what pioneers is all about.

This is just one example of the kind of projects that your £300 pioneer donation will make possible.

Become a pioneer
Photo of an RSPB pioneer

help discover seabird foraging zones.
your £300 could buy twelve GPS tags.