"Unbelievably Bad" Breeding Season For Scottish Seabirds

[hatrack]

"A SHORTAGE of food has pushed the seabird colonies in the Northern Isles into an unprecedented crisis. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has revealed that this year has been the worst on record for the birds in Orkney and Shetland, which have produced fewer young than in any previous year.

Almost all seabirds breeding in Shetland’s internationally important colonies feed on sandeels, which have become increasingly scarce. The society says guillemot colonies have been devastated for the second year running. The birds can fly many miles to find shoals of sandeels and can dive to more than 100 metres below the surface to catch them. However, the vital food is becoming difficult to find.

Other species, such as Arctic terns and kittiwakes, have also been severely affected, with poor breeding numbers and survival rates. This year no tern or kittiwake chicks were reared in the south of Shetland. Great skuas, known as bonxies in Shetland, have also suffered a severe breeding failure. A lack of food has led the sometimes predatory species to feed on other seabirds and even the young of other skuas. At most skua colonies this year no young are expected to fledge.

Pete Ellis, the RSPB’s Shetland area manager, said: "The situation is still getting worse for our struggling seabirds. The failure of almost all great skuas to rear young is unprecedented, and the populations of some species such as Arctic skuas are now reaching critical levels and the future for them looks bleak here." Martin Heubeck of Aberdeen University, who has recorded seabird breeding success at Sumburgh Head for almost 30 years, said: "This has been an almost unbelievably bad breeding season. The scale of the breeding failure of guillemots is unprecedented in Europe."

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http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=866762004&20040729112145

[lynx rufus]

1. another good find

[hatrack]

2. Update - "Unprecedented" Breeding Failure, Multiple Species - Independent

"Hundreds of thousands of Scottish seabirds have failed to breed this summer in a wildlife catastrophe which is being linked by scientists directly to global warming. The massive unprecedented collapse of nesting attempts by several seabird species in Orkney and Shetland is likely to prove the first major impact of climate change on Britain.

In what could be a sub-plot from the recent disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, a rise in sea temperature is believed to have led to the mysterious disappearance of a key part of the marine food chain - the sandeel, the small fish whose great teeming shoals have hitherto sustained larger fish, marine mammals and seabirds in their millions.

EDIT

Martin Heubeck of Aberdeen University, who has monitored Shetland seabirds for 30 years, said: "The breeding failure of the guillemots is unprecedented in Europe." More than 6,800 pairs of great skuas were recorded in Shetland in the same census; this year they have produced a handful of chicks - perhaps fewer than 10 - while the arctic skuas (1,120 pairs in the census) have failed to produce any surviving young. The 24,000 pairs of arctic terns, and the 16,700 pairs of Shetland kittiwakes - small gulls - have "probably suffered complete failure", said Mr Ellis.

In Orkney the picture is very similar, although detailed figures are not yet available. "It looks very bad," said the RSPB's warden on Orkney mainland, Andy Knight. "Very few of the birds have raised any chicks at all." The counting and monitoring is still going on and the figures are by no means complete: it is likely that puffins, for example, will also have suffered massive breeding failure but because they nest deep in burrows, this is not immediately obvious."

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http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=communique&newsid=6193

[Eurobabe]

3. GOP: who cares, they're just BIRDS

[Kool Kitty]

4. Sad, isn't it?

That is exactly this administration's reaction to anything that doesn't directly affect them or their pet corporations. Wasn't it James "I'm outraged by the outrage" Inhoffe that said global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? doesn't sound like a hoax to me. This birds are the "canaries in the coal mine". All the creatures on this planet, and that includes us, are all connected and we'll all share the same fate, I'm afraid.

[Matilda]

5. In their arrogance, they don't believe human beings will be affected.

Birds, fish, mammals just don't count in their schemes, but they
believe that humans are invulnerable, so they just don't think
about the problem.

[hatrack]

6. Crash Also Now Underway In English Seabird Colonies - Independent

Warming oceans and over-fishing blamed for collapse of seabird colonies in the British Isles

"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."

EDIT

http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=communique&newsid=6203