Noup Cliffs Colony Count

Early June is the time to count the population of the seabirds breeding on the cliff ledges on our seabird reserves, and that is exactly what RSPB staff spent last Saturday doing at Noup Cliffs! The seabird colonies on our Noup Cliffs reserve on Westray hadn’t been counted since 2004, so it was about time for us to do another count to see how the population of nesting birds has changed in the last nine years.

So, early on Saturday morning, staff from the Stromness office took the early boat over to Westray for a full day of seabird counting! Once on Westray we split into two groups, and telescopes in hand, half of us made our way up to Noup Cliffs to get started. The cliffs are 75metres high and stretch for about 2 miles along the coast, with birds nesting all along the cliff faces, so we had a lot of counting to do! A group of five of us made our way slowly along the cliffs, counting all of the Guillemots and Razorbills, and any Kittiwake, Shag and Gannet nests that we could see, as well as noting down any Puffins that we saw along the way.

Early on in the counting, and the Guillemot counters are already behind the others!

1,2,3....1001, 1002, 1003... counting Guillemots took a long time!

This often involved getting quite close to the cliff edges so that we could see (and count!) all of the birds below, but we were very careful not to get too close with the cliffs being that high! 7 hours later, and a mad rush back to catch the ferry on time, and we were done! All seabirds visible from the top of the cliffs were counted – good effort everyone!

Getting close to the edge to count!

Meanwhile, the rest of the team made their way down to the pier to greet visitors as they arrived for the boat trip that was going to go around the base of the cliffs so that people could look at the seabirds from a new angle. The team of staff on the M.V. Golden Mariana were going to count the seabirds from the boat and take a series of photos of the cliff face from the sea as well. All previous counts of the colony have been from land, but there are several areas of cliff that can’t be seen from land, so we wanted to try and get a count from sea as well, to see how well they compare. Unfortunately, it was a bit rough out on the sea, and the count had to be abandoned part way through, but we did manage to get a full set of photos of the cliffs, so we will be able to count all of the nesting birds from these, which will give us a unique comparison between land-based and sea-based counts.

The boat as we saw it from the cliffs. It doesn’t look too rough, but there was quite a bit of swell! Scary stuff, but he’s not as close to the edge as he looks, honest!

We are still awaiting the results from counts of the photos, and until we compare our land-based counts with the figures that we get from the photos, we must consider these numbers to be minimum figures. There is always a degree of uncertainty with any counts of large seabird colonies, but our land-based counts are directly comparable to the previous counts done in 2004 and in 2000, as these were also done from land. So here are the preliminary results from our day of counting!

We also counted 54 Puffins and 9 Black Guillemots, but these are almost certainly under-estimates, as there could be many more birds in their burrows and therefore hidden from view. These results were pretty much what we expected them to be - we know that most of our seabird species are on the decline, with the biggest decreases seen in the numbers of Kittiwakes. A depressing state of affairs really, with only the Gannets showing a steady increase, but with the stopping of fishing discards, even these hardy birds may start to decline, which makes the work that we do here even more important. We survey the seabird populations, monitor their breeding to see how many chicks they are raising, and track individual birds to find out where they are feeding and what they are feeding their chicks. This helps us to know what’s happening with our local seabird populations and how this compares to other colonies across the UK and Europe. The next national count is set for 2015, so we will see then how our seabird populations change over the next two years.

If you would like to visit this bustling seabird city, please click HERE to find out more about our Noup Cliffs reserve.