Surfbirds News

Cliffs in some parts of the north and west are near-empty, where there should be thousands of birds nesting. Climate change seems to be disrupting food availability. The RSPB is keen to ensure that areas seabirds use for feeding should receive greater protection, and the Society is calling for a Marine Bill.

Last week Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a half-hearted commitment to introducing a draft marine bill in his legislative programme, put out for consultation last week.

Guillemot, copyright Jeremy McClements

Martin Harper is the head of the RSPB's sustainable development department. Reacting to Gordon Brown's statement, he said: 'Increasing protection for marine wildlife has been an outstanding commitment for this government over the last decade. We are disappointed, therefore, that the Prime Minister remains to be fully convinced of this need.

'The protection of sites and species on land has not been mirrored in the marine environment, leaving species and habitats vulnerable to many threats. Any omission from this year's legislative programme remains a great concern to the RSPB and jeopardises the government's manifesto commitment.'

'We owe it to everyone who believes in greater protection for the marine environment to continue our fight.'

Norman Ratcliffe, seabird ecologist with RSPB Scotland, said: 'Yet again, Scotland's seabirds seem to have had another worrying season. Our reserves on Orkney and the west coast definitely seem to have suffered from lack of food to feed chicks.

'Some cliffs - which should be packed with birds - are just about bare, as adult birds abandon the nest once their breeding attempt has failed.

'This is all linked to food availability, which can be disrupted for a number of reasons. We're fairly certain that on the east coast, rising sea temperatures are leading to plankton regime shifts, which in turn affects fish like sandeels - a major food source for seabirds.

Puffin, Northumberland, copyright Sean Gray

'Sandeels might be abundant for a time, but when this critical food source enters the next phase of its life cycle, they swim down to the bottom of the sea and bury themselves in the sand, meaning they become unavailable as food.

'This often happens sometime in July, but if it occurs early, you can get mass mortality of near-fledged chicks as has been seen for terns nesting on Coquet Island, in Northumberland, this year.

'Parent birds may then switch to pipefish, but chicks find these hard to swallow, they are less nutritious, and the parents spend much longer away from the nest, leaving chicks vulnerable to predation and attack from neighbouring nests.'

The UK's coastline is home to 18 exclusively marine species of seabird, including puffin, gannet, kittiwake and guillemot. The great skua, Manx shearwater, gannet and shag have their most important populations in the world in the UK.

Although the full picture won't be known until later in the summer, it's already clear that some areas of the country have had a disastrous year, with Orkney, parts of Shetland and north-west Scotland suffering badly - definitely worse than last year, and probably the worst since the dreadful 2004 season.

The relationship between temperature and food requires more research. It is not as simple as saying 'warmer waters are bad for seabirds', because if warmer waters bring more food, then seabirds will do well. Puffins in Norway do well in warmer years because herring there are more productive in higher sea temperatures.

A full analysis of the season will only be possible at the end of the summer, but the RSPB believes it is indeed very worrying that this is another in a recurrent run of bad seabird breeding years in Scotland, and an indication of how wildlife is having difficulty adjusting to our changing climate.