Albatross

I attended a talk by Chris Packham yesterday, and most entertaining it was. He showed some great photographs he had taken down in the Antarctic region, including some great Albatross shots. The Albatross  falls into the category of  ' one of my most favourite bird's I will  probably never see'.  These birds are so designed to fly, and do so with so little energy input. They often live 60 years.Some have a wingspan over 3 metres.Unfortunately the species is largely being systematically wiped out by humans. The introduction of rats and other predators onto it's breeding grounds, the pollution of the sea's with plastics that are regurgitated into it's young, and worse of all line fishing , wiping out tens of  thousands, that's right, tens of thousands of this species every year. For a bird that hardly reproduces for the first 10 years of its life, is painfully slow to fledge, and is reliant on the the ever plundered food sources of the Southern Oceans, it could easily vanish in our lifetimes.Predation by introduced species  to it's breeding grounds may be addressed to some extent. The industrial scale fishing for species, such as Squid, by the likes of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, using lines up to 8 km long is very difficult for 'us' to challenge. What can be done? I guess that's up to each of us as individuals, depending on how these things touch us. All I could do today was write this in my lunchbreak.