STAR performers

"Then just curl up on the ground and pretend to be a rock until I say you can move".  These were the instructions given to me and two colleagues on my recent trip to Colonsay to see our seabird tracking team.

 We had been keen to see for ourselves the work that our team is doing to improve our understanding of seabird foraging behaviour.  We were lucky to have chosen one of Colonsay's few blue and still days of the summer.

With two members of our seabird tracking team, Tessa and Emily, we had walked to one of the seabird cliffs of the island (home to nearly 30,000 seabirds).  We then watched as Tessa began the difficult task of catching a kittiwake from the nest.  She did this by carefully extending a fishing pole with a loop at one end until she was able to quickly catch a bird and then place it into a bag to keep it calm. 

We then watched Tessa and Emily complete a routine with skill and considerable speed.  They weighed the bird, ringed it, colour marked it and then fitted a GPS tag (weighing just15g) onto the bird's back.

Once complete, the bird was let go and we watched carefully until the kittiwake returned to the nest, continued incubating its eggs as if nothing had happened.  The rest of the colony looked on and seemed remarkably unfazed by what had happened to one of its neighbours.

And then the process was able to begin again. 

For guillemots, the only difference was that the 'fishing' took place from the top of the cliff and it took much longer for the guillemot to return to the nest.  Tessa had suggested that it might take anything up to twenty minutes for the bird to return.  And that was the period when we had to assume our 'rock' position.  The idea was that we would do nothing to prevent the bird from returning but equally we were on hand to scare away herring gulls (which were nesting in the rocks above) if they flew past the guillemot's nest with its unguarded eggs.

Our guillemot took a lot longer to return than we anticipated and I am ashamed to admit that I nodded off briefly in my rock-position while awaiting the bird's return.  In my defence, the sun was shining, we had been up pretty early, late to bed etc etc.

But the bird did return and we were then able to move on to new cliffs and new birds.

After we left the magical island, I was pleased to hear from Tessa that at least some of 'our' birds had been recaptured, had their tags removed and the data showing their movements (and diving depths) had been recorded.  This is the fourth year of our seabird tracking programme and we are slowly but surely compiling a hugely impressive database of the movement of over 1000 birds.  The graphic shows the map of movement of kittiwakes tagged on Colonsay last year. 

Not only will this help inform where to identify sites for designating protected areas for seabirds but also to influence development in the marine environment by ensuring the most sensitive locations are avoided.

What's move, the team is now beginning to construct models to predict where the best places might be in parts of the sea that we have not had the resources to track based on oceanographic information and new knowledge about seabird movements.

All of this is thanks to the dedication and professionalism of our team of researchers, spread across some of the most remote parts of the UK, who spend half their summer fishing for seabirds and half their time pretending to be rocks. 

If you would like to find out more about the programme please do keep an eye on our Safeguard our Sealife blog where you can read updates from teams across the UK.