SSC Specialist Group Profile: Threatened Waterfowl Specialist Group (TWSG)

The series of SSC Specialist Group profiles continues with an update from the Threatened Waterfowl Specialist Group. The TWSG contributes significant depth and knowledge to the volunteer network of the SSC, with over 900 members in 143 countries worldwide.

Threatened Waterfowl Group overview
The members
The species

Overview of the Threatened Waterfowl Specialist Group (TWSG)

The TWSG was established in 1990 and is coordinated by The Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT), as part of the Specialist Group network of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, and Wetlands International (formerly IWRB).

The aims of the Group are to identify which Anseriformes taxa (ducks, geese, swans and screamers) are globally threatened; monitor their status; produce international action plans; and carry out and exchange information on conservation projects that address globally threatened Anseriformes. TWSG membership is free, and in January 2003, the Group had 918 members in 143 countries worldwide. Members active in threatened waterfowl conservation are encouraged to submit articles to the Group's bulletin, contribute to Action Plans and participate in activities such as workshops and international meetings.

All members receive the Group's annual bulletin, TWSG News, which disseminates new information on status and threats, promotes the exchange of information between conservationists in different countries, and encourages participation in threatened waterfowl conservation. Bodies receiving the newsletter include other IUCN/SSC and Wetlands International Specialist Groups, government departments, NGOs, academic institutions, commercial companies, zoos, captive breeders, environmental consultants, travel companies, publishers, environmental activists, and professional and private individuals with an interest in conservation.

In addition to TWSG News, the Group also makes use of the TWSG-Forum listserv, which facilitates online exchange of information about globally threatened or near-threatened Anseriformes. To subscribe, e-mail Majordomo@wwt.org.uk with "subscribe twsg-forum" (without quotes) in the body of the message. To unsubscribe, simply replace the word "subscribe" with "unsubscribe". To circulate a message to all TWSG Forum members, send your message to: TWSG-Forum@wwt.org.uk

To find out more visit the Group's website: http://www.wwt.org.uk/threatsp/twsg

TWSG Member Profiles

Nikolai Petkov
Nicky Petkov has been involved in wetland monitoring and conservation for over 10 years. Since 1996, he has been monitoring wintering geese in Bulgaria, including the globally threatened Red-breasted and Lesser White-fronted Geese. Since 1995, he has been working on the Near Threatened Ferruginous Duck. He organised and conducted the first national breeding census of the species in Bulgaria in 1996/97, and repeated the survey in 2002. In the same year, Nicky became coordinator of the BirdLife International Ferruginous Duck Conservation Team and organized an international Ferruginous Duck workshop in Bulgaria . The meeting was attended by conservationists from all over the world and gathered information for a new Bonn Convention Status Report and Action Plan. In 2001-2002, Nicky coordinated White-headed Duck monitoring in Bulgaria for a regional Balkan project between Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey and Romania. He is currently employed in the Conservation Department of the Bulgarian Society for the Protection of Birds, coordinating conservation work on threatened waterfowl and wetlands. He is about to complete his PhD on Ferruginous Duck ecology at the Central Laboratory of General Ecology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Nancy Drilling
Nancy Drilling is a PhD candidate in the Conservation Biology Graduate Program at the University of Minnesota. She received her MSc from Illinois State University, studying the behavioural ecology of House Wrens. Since that time, she has researched shorebirds and human disturbance with Manomet Observatory for Conservation Sciences and been involved throughout the U.S with several radio-telemetry studies of dabbling ducks and geese. A three-year Peace Corps experience in Thailand, surveying montane bird communities and advising the government's captive breeding programme, piqued her interest in Southeast Asia's avifauna and conservation issues. Her dissertation research is a behavioural and ecological study of the endangered White-winged Duck in Sumatra, Indonesia. Current White-winged Duck projects include analysis and write-up of the field data, a genetic comparison of Sumatran versus Assam birds, generation of a predictive model of the impact of climate change on White-winged Ducks, and planning for regional White-winged Duck Action Plan workshops.

Andy Green
Andy completed a zoology degree at Magdalen College, Oxford University, then stayed at Oxford to do a PhD on sexual selection in amphibians at Wolfson College. In 1989, he moved to the research department in The Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge, also in the UK. There he was responsible for conservation and research programmes concerning globally threatened waterfowl. One of his major tasks was to establish the TWSG, which he chaired from 1992 to 1999. From the outset, Andy was particularly involved in conservation activities for threatened duck species in Mediterranean countries, especially White-headed Duck and Marbled Teal, producing several action plans for both species. He has also worked with the White-winged Duck in Asia, and with Madagascar Teal.

Andy became acutely aware of the need to do more focused research on the ecology of threatened Anatidae species to establish in detail the causes of their decline and measures required to conserve them. In 1993, he moved to southern Spain to begin field research on the Marbled Teal at the Doñana Biological Station (http://www.ebd.csic.es/), a centre of the Spanish Higher Council of Science attached to the Ministry of Science and Technology. Andy started there with a Royal Society European Science Exchange Programme fellowship, gaining tenure as an Associate Professor in 2000. He now does research in a variety of fields applied to the conservation of waterbirds and wetlands in the Mediterranean region, but retains a special interest in Marbled Teal and White-headed Duck. He has published over 60 research papers in peer-reviewed journals, three monographs and over 30 articles in books. He currently has four PhD students, including Cristina Fuentes who works on habitat selection by Marbled Teal in Alicante, and Violeta Muñoz who works on the genetics of hybridisation between White-headed and Ruddy Ducks. His post-doc Jordi Figuerola recently completed his PhD on the role of Marbled Teal and other ducks in dispersing aquatic plants and invertebrates between wetlands.

Luís Fábio Silveira
Luís Fábio Silveira began studying the Brazilian Merganser at Serra da Canastra National Park in 1996, after which him and his colleague Dr Wolf Bartmann conducted annual surveys of mergansers at the park, focusing on the birds’ habitat requirements. Luís is one of Brazil’s leading ornithologists – he acts as a technical consultant to BirdLife International on a wide variety of species, and has conducted many pioneering expeditions to little-known areas of Brazil, including Estação Ecológica de Uruçuí-Una and Parque Nacional da Serra das Confusões, both in Piauí state. He was part of a team responsible for rediscovering the White-winged Potoo (Nyctibius leucopterus). Luís has recently completed a PhD on the phylogenetic relationships of Curassows based on osteological characters.

Species Profiles

Brazilian Merganser (Mergus octosetaceus)
The Brazilian Merganser is one of the world's most endangered ducks; less than 250 survive in the wild, and the species is predicted to become extinct within 10 years. Birds are especially sensitive to habitat degradation within river catchments, from activities such as logging, mining and agriculture. This species is sedentary, eats fish, and occurs on rivers flowing through remote sub-tropical forest in Brazil. Almost nothing is known about its biology, and only two nests have ever been found.

A recovery plan for the Brazilian Merganser was produced following a conservation planning workshop in Brazil in September 2000, attended by experts from all three Brazilian Merganser range states (Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay), Europe and the United States. It collated background information on the status and distribution, life history, and threats faced by the Brazilian Merganser and drew up generic recommendations for conservation action.

The recovery team held a follow-up meeting in October 2002. Great enthusiasm exists in Brazil for saving this species. Over the next three years, planned conservation projects include a detailed study of the birds breeding ecology at the world's most important site, Serra da Canastra National Park in South Central Brazil to collect basic information needed to adequately protect the species.

White-headed Duck (Oxyura leucocephala)
White-headed Duck conservation continues to dominate the TWSG's activities. It is the only stiff-tail native to the Palearctic, with a patchy and shrinking range across the Mediterranean and Central Asia. The main breeding grounds are thought to be in northern Kazakhstan and southern Russia. However, as birds disperse to breed over a wide area of mainly unexplored habitat, few breeding concentrations have ever been found. The world population of the White-headed Duck was thought to number around 100,000 at the start of this century and, in the 1930s, over 50,000 birds wintered on the Caspian Sea off Turkmenistan. Numbers declined sharply during the 20th century, however, mainly due to habitat loss and degradation, and heavy hunting pressure.

The distribution is highly fragmented with only three main populations left: a migratory central Asian population, breeding in northern Kazakhstan and southern Russia; a migratory east Asian population, breeding in southern Russia and wintering in Pakistan; and a west Mediterranean population resident in Spain and North Africa. Numbers in the Asian populations have declined markedly since the 1930s, from around 100,000 to perhaps only 10,000 birds. This includes a crash in the numbers at the White-headed Duck's main wintering site, Burdur Gölü in Turkey, from 11,000 birds in 1991 to fewer than 3000 since. The population wintering in Pakistan has fallen from around 1000 birds in the late 1960s to only 50 in 1995 and may be destined for extinction. Only the western Mediterranean population has benefited from conservation action. Habitat preservation, protection from hunting, and captive breeding have increased numbers in Spain to over 2,000 birds.

Marbled Teal (Marmaronetta angustirostris)
Marbled Teal, like many threatened waterfowl, both breed and winter in areas with large human populations. They are therefore much more susceptible to habitat loss and hunting which have reduced the global population by an estimated 90% to some 34,000 birds. Large areas of habitat important to the species have been completely destroyed or degraded, for example in the Euphrates Marshes of Iraq, where 4,000-6,000 pairs once bred; this area has recently been significantly drained. Construction of new dams on the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates upstream in Turkey and Syria is causing further drainage of these marshes. The species is susceptible to habitat loss and hunting during winter, as most of the world population congregates on only one site, the Shadegan Marshes in Iran.

Ferruginous Duck (Aythya nyroca)
The Ferruginous Duck is listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. It appears on the List because it is thought to have declined by almost 30% over the last 10 years and that this decline is likely to continue for the next 10 years. This species is a little-studied, partial migrant, widely distributed in Europe, Asia and Africa. It is relatively common in Asia and Africa where there have been winter counts of 50,000 birds in Pakistan, 30,000 in Mongolia, 21,000 in Turkmenistan, and 14,000 in Mali. However, the European population has undergone a marked decline, notably in Ukraine, where numbers have fallen from 70,000 to 1,500 pairs since the 1950s, and in Poland (300-400 pairs to 30-40 since the 1980s). The European population is estimated at 13,000-24,000 pairs. A significant proportion of these birds now occur on artificial habitats, especially fishponds in Eastern European, and it seems this habitat may now be crucial to the Ferruginous Duck's survival in Europe. Principal threats are habitat loss and degradation, and hunting. Others threats include the introduction of non-native species (particularly Grass Carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella), drowning in fishing nets, lead poisoning, disturbance, and climate change (causing drought conditions in Asian breeding and African wintering areas). A European action plan was published in 2001 and a new Bonn Convention Action Plan is being prepared.

White-winged Duck (Cairina scutulata)
This species is a secretive, rare inhabitant of tropical lowland forests in Southeast Asia. It was once was widespread throughout the region, including India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, PDR Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In the past 50 years, massive destruction and fragmentation of the species' forest habitat and intense hunting pressure has caused a drastic reduction in numbers. The current world population in the wild is 350-2000 individuals, possibly less than 5% of the original population. Listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, this duck is legally protected from hunting and collecting in five countries (Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia). Some populations occur within protected areas but most populations are outside protected areas and are in danger because of deforestation, fires, wetland drainage, pollution, and human disturbance.

A three-year research project has been conducted at Way Kambas National Park in Sumatra, Indonesia, which has the largest known population of White-winged Ducks in the world, with an estimated 30-100 individuals. Field research focused on collecting data about basic breeding biology, habitat use, adult and juvenile survival, and dispersal of wild White-winged Ducks. The overall home range size of breeding females was found to be 122 - 142 ha, with one non-breeding female having a home range of 252 ha. Ideally, various types of wetlands should be protected so that the ducks would have a place to move to during times when water levels fluctuate. Survey and capture techniques were developed so that other researchers can effectively conduct research on White-winged Ducks, and university students were trained in field research techniques so that they can conduct their own research in the future. An environmental education programme was conducted in all middle schools near the park borders, further enhancing the capacity building element of the programme.

Other species
Other single-species activities of the TWSG over the past three years have included: