Seabird
Breeding Crisis
Spreads To England
By Michael McCarthy
31 July 2004
The Independent
England's biggest seabird colony is suffering
from the global warming-induced severe food shortage that has devastated
the birds of the Northern Isles of Scotland.
Bempton Cliffs,
the towering 400ft chalk cliffs on the Yorkshire coast near Flamborough
Head, where 200,000 seabirds nest, are this year witnessing the same
large-scale breeding failure that has hit seabird colonies all over
Orkney and Shetland. The spectacular breeding crash in the islands,
revealed in yesterday's Independent, is likely to prove the first major
impact of climate change on Britain.
But Scotland is
not alone. The 45,000-strong colony of kittwakes, (small gulls) at Bempton
has just had its worst breeding season ever, reports the Royal Society
for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which says that the nesting success
rate has been "unbelievably bad," and thinks the failure is
for the same reasons as those seen in Scotland.
RSPB wardens estimate
that this year there will be fewer than one chick raised for every four
kittiwake nests at Bempton. The long-term average is one chick per nest.
The wardens are
convinced that the birds are failing because they cannot find enough
sandeels, the small silvery shoaling fish that make up the key component
in their diet. Sandeel shortages are behind the breeding disaster in
the Northern Isles. Stocks in the North Sea have been shrinking in recent
years, and research has linked this decline with the rising temperature
of the water, which has gone up by 2C in 20 years. This year the Northern
Isles sandeel stocks have vanished and they have been seriously depleted
further south.
The RSPB said yesterday:
"The news from Bempton Cliffs is particularly alarming because,
like the canary in the coal mine, the fortunes of kittiwakes are regarded
as an important measure of the health of the marine environment. The
UK government uses kittiwakes as an indicator of the state of the sea."
Trevor Charlton,
the RSPB warden at Bempton Cliffs, said that kittiwakes all along the
Yorkshire coast had had an "unbelievably bad" breeding season.
"The news from many seabird colonies along the North Sea coast
is very gloomy this year," he said.
"It's a strong
sign that something is seriously wrong. There is an urgent need for
more research into the sandeel situation and continued monitoring of
seabird populations. If climate change predictions are correct, then
the situation will get even worse in the coming years."
Although climate
change is believed to be the cause of the current sandeel decline around
Orkney and Shetland - because the cold-water plankton on which the young
fish depend have moved northwards - there is a large industrial fishery
for sandeels in the central North Sea, carried out by Danish boats.
The Danes catch
the oil-rich sandeels in enormous quantities and process them into fish
meal for feeding to livestock and farmed salmon. Last year they had
an EU fisheries quota of 800,000 tons - but they were only able to catch
300,000 tons of it, said Dr Euan Dunn, the RSPB's head of marine policy.
The time had now
come for this quota to be set at a more precautionary level, Dr Dunn
said, adding that the RSPB would be looking to the UK Government to
take up the case at the EU Fisheries Council this autumn.
Government seabird
biologists fear that the widespread breeding failures this year could
be the start of a population slide. "Although seabirds such as
kittiwakes are inherently 'buffered' against the occasional years of
poor food supply - they are long-lived and have a high annual survival
rate - continued unproductive seasons will lead to a population decline,"
said Dr Matt Parsons of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee seabird
colony team in Aberdeen.