Philippe Borsa (IRD) nous dresse le bilan de l’avifaune des atolls Chesterfield-Bampton et d’Entrecasteaux (Nouvelle-Calédonie)

New Caledonia is a French territory situated in Oceania with a total area of ​​18,575 km², including 16,346 km² for the main island called Grande Terre. This archipelago is bordered to the east and south by the South Pacific Ocean and to the north and west by the Coral Sea, which is considered one of the last tropical marine regions of the planet relatively undamaged by human activities. Several coral islets and sandy cays are scattered there, including the Chesterfield-Bampton and Bellona atolls, ​​situated more than 530 km west of Grande Terre, and those of Entrecasteaux, located more than 220 km north-west of the latter. Uninhabited, they are of great ornithological interest as they host large colonies of seabirds, the most numerous being the Wedge-tailed Shearwater (Ardenna pacifica) and the Sooty Tern (Onychoprion fuscatus). Despite the geographical isolation of these islets and some protection measures, various threats weigh or have weighed on their breeding avifauna, such as overfishing, marine pollution, introduction of rats and human disturbances.
In order to review the populations of the seabirds breeding on these groups of islands and their evolution over the last decades, Philippe Borsa and Alice Philippe, from the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) and Aubert Le Bouteiller, of the Société Calédonienne d’Ornithologie, compiled the reports of several ornithological missions and observations available for the last decades, and they presented their results in two articles published in 2021 in the Bulletin of the Zoological Society of France.
Philippe Borsa, research director at the IRD, answered our questions on the current situation of the avifauna of the atolls of Entrecasteaux and Chesterfield-Bampton and Bellona, and on the threats to it.