Thirty-Five Years of Counting the Same Penguin Colonies

The Falkland Islands hold globally significant numbers of black-browed albatross, gentoo, Magellanic and southern rockhopper penguins, and until someone counts them nobody can say whether they are rising or falling. Falklands Conservation, the islands' largest membership conservation charity since 1979, has run the Falkland Islands Seabird Monitoring Programme every year since 1989/90 — the same sites, the same species, breeding pairs and breeding success, season after season, in weather that makes each visit an expedition. That unglamorous continuity is what allows the IUCN to move a species: black-browed albatross came off the Endangered list to Least Concern, and gentoo penguins were downgraded from Near Threatened, both on evidence this programme supplied. In April 2022 its work confirmed the islands' inshore waters as Key Biodiversity Areas for nine seabird species.