We would like to introduce one of our Wildbase Veterinary Residents – Bryony Griffiths. Bryony was a falconer in her past life, working with wild and captive-born birds of prey in public education, natural pest control, and wildlife rehabilitation in Canada. Bryony has worked in many animal roles after moving to New Zealand in 2013; beekeeping, DOC ranger, pest control, and zookeeping. Bryony’s goal has always been to study vet med, and so she applied and was accepted into the School of Veterinary Medicine at Massey. After graduating with her BVSc she undertook a stint doing emergency and critical care, then accepted a residency role at Wildbase Hospital. “I’m excited to be able to merge my passions of wildlife conservation and veterinary medicine into a career.”
Bryony trained with the IWRC in wildlife rehabilitation, nutrition, and oiled wildlife response, and she feels that this, along with her varied career in conservation, animal keeping, and veterinary medicine, means she can approach complex situations like spills with multiple facets of experience.  “I'm keen to continue adding to my toolkit and learning from the wealth of knowledge within the Wildbase OWR team!”

The 10 GOWRS organisations met at Mallydams, one of the RSPCAs wildlife hospital and rehabilitation centres in the UK, in April this year. We continue to strengthen our network and develop protocols and procedures for our ability to deploy a professional oiled wildlife assessment team globally.  During the meetings, we ran a very successful exercise including the UK RSPCA wildlife team based on the recent collision between the container ship the Solong and the tanker the Stena Immaculate, including the consideration of how a response would operate in the UK during the current heightened HPAI restrictions. If you would like to know more about GOWRS and what we get up to, please visit our website https://gowrs.org/ (homepage pictured above).

Following the GOWRS meeting, many of the GOWRS team moved on to the Interspill conference in London. GOWRS's booth on the conference floor provided a platform for us to meet, greet and explain what GOWRS is all about. This is one of the two conferences that many of the GOWRS teams will be attending this year, with the second one being the Effects of Oil on Wildlife Conference in Cape Town in October this year. This conference is an international event that brings together researchers, conservationists, policymakers, and industry to address the impact of oil spills on wildlife. It is the only global event that focuses on the planning, response, rehabilitation, release and research aspects of oil spills and their effects on wildlife. EOW aims to foster collaboration, share knowledge and exchange ideas to advance the field of oiled wildlife preparedness and response.

Dr Megan Jolly (Senior Practicing Veterinarian at Wildbase) went on a short fieldwork trip in March with BirdsNZ to the Gannet Colony at Farewell Spit, Golden Bay. The trip was primarily to continue a program of banding adult Australasian Gannets in the colony to enable long-term monitoring. Over the last breeding season a few birds in the colony were noticed to have abnormal “black eyes” similar to those reported in Gannets recovered from Highly pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) in the Northern Hemisphere. During this trip we were able to confirm that the dark appearance of the eyes in these adult birds is likely a result of inflammation within the eyeball (uveitis) at some point in the past with several changes present within the eye including a change of the iris to the completely dark chocolate brown rather than the light blue/gold that is normal in adult Gannets. These observations confirm that the bird has had inflammation of the eyes at some point in the past but there are several causes and cannot be directly linked to HPAI which at time of writing has not been diagnosed in New Zealand Wildlife. The bird examined was in good body condition and could see so the changes did not appear to be significantly impacting it’s life. The bird is now tagged and will be monitored as part of the ongoing monitoring of this colony.

Exercising procedures, plans and protocols across New Zealand is part of the Wildbase job, and earlier this year, we travelled to Nelson to help with one of their annual exercises. This trip also gave us the opportunity to work with the local National Oiled Wildlife team member, Jeremy Butler and confirm a site within the region where an Oiled Wildlife Facility could be set up if needed. The Nelson area has a significant large vessel fishing port and borders New Zealand's Cook Strait, a high oil spill risk area due to the daily ferry crossings between the North and South Islands and significant vessel traffic passing through the strait travelling to the east coast of the South Island.