Positionner ses observations ornithologiques dans le Golfe de Gascogne sans GPS

Seabirds are a group of birds which are pelagic in nature. This means they spend most of their time at sea and only come to land to nest and rear young. This can make them difficult to observe, especially when many species choose remote offshore islands for their procreation and many only come to their nest sites at night, spending all day gathering food at sea.
The Bay of Biscay, off the Western coast of France, is one of the best area in the World for whale-watching (over 20 cetacean species have been recorded in the bay) and seawatching, as good numbers of many species are recorded each year.
The P&O cruise ferry « the Pride of Bilbao » offers a regular and cost effective means of travelling through a variety of cetacean habitats from the English coast to the Spanish one. The FerryBox equipment was first fitted on the P&O Pride of Bilbao in April 2002. Since then data has been transmitted to NOC (National Oceanography Centre, Southampton) using the Orbcomm satellite system and displayed on a webpage in real time: Philippe Dubois, a Belgian birder, found it was a good way to positionnate his data without a GPS equipment.