Fears for fulmars after breeding survey shows huge drop in numbers
Dramatic 60% decline in seabirds may be down to dwindling fishing industry
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A COUNT of seabirds nesting at a beauty spot on a north estate has revealed that numbers have fallen by around 60% in the last decade.
This year’s survey of nesting fulmars on the John Muir Trust’s Sandwood Bay estate, near Cape Wrath, recorded just 261 nesting pairs on the cliffs that supported over 700 pairs about 10 years ago.
And the results of the count have raised fears that 2008 could be another dire year for Scotland’s seabirds.
Cathel Morrison, who is conservation manager for the Sutherland estate, said the trust had been counting breeding fulmars — a key indicator species for the health of the North Sea — on the same three-mile stretch of cliffs between Sandwood Bay and Sheigra since 1997.
He said: “Our surveys in both 2008 and 2007 have recorded the lowest fulmar counts since records began.
“It looks as though the fulmar, one of our most common and resilient seabirds, is in as much trouble as other species, such as puffins, kittiwakes, guillemots and arctic terns.”
Related to the albatross, the fulmar looks like a gull, but is in fact a member of the petrel family. They can live for up to 50 years and are a constant companion to fishing boats in the North Sea and Atlantic, eating the discards from fishing boats, as well as zooplankton and small fish from under the ocean’s surface.
Mr Morrison said the trust’s fulmar count mirrored annual research collated by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, the UK Government’s adviser on nature conservation, into seabird numbers in Britain and Ireland.
The latest available figures, for surveys in 2005 and 2006, show a decrease in fulmars in western regions of Britain, combined with poor breeding success in the north of Scotland, continuing a downward trend in numbers across Britain since the late 1990s.
Mr Morrison said fulmars did not dive for sand eels, like many other seabirds, and their population decline could not therefore be attributed to the disappearance — linked by many to climate change — of this single source of food.
He said they could be suffering from a more general famine and were likely to have been affected by the dwindling fishing industry.
“These results are alarming. If this rate of decline does not level off soon, we could be looking at the collapse of our seabird colony at Sandwood within the next few years,” said Mr Morrison.
