The first few weeks of June are busy times for staff on seabird reserves (its busy times for the seabirds too!). Nia and myself have just completed a full island count of all our auks (guillemots and razorbills, plus puffins on the North Bishop), fulmars and kittiwakes.
Overall its good news, with one exception. Rather than bombard you with graphs and figures for all species in one blog, I'll do a short blog for each. We'll start with my favourite auk, the razorbill, and this is one of the good news stories
Razorbills nest all around the coast of Ramsey, tucked in to boulders and crevices they are a tricky customer to census. We follow the same guidance as all seabird monitoring folk around the UK, laid out in the 'bible' known as the Seabird Monitoring Handbook. We count the largest colonies multiple times over the course of the first 2 weeks of June to get an average and then take a boat trip around the island, and out to the Bishops and Clerks to mop up the smaller sub colonies.
With seabirds that build a nest (e.g. kittiwakes) or occupy defined areas of a cliff face while incubating (e.g. fulmars) we can count the actual numbers of nests built, or apparent sites occupied. Razorbills (and guillemots) don't afford us that luxury, either nesting out of site or occupying tiny sections of cliff face with partner birds crammed in next to them. For this reason we 'simply' count all individual birds present in the breeding colony, ignoring large aggregations of obvious non breeders that often gather on the tide line or favoured loafing rocks on the edge of the colony.
Now the good news - in 2021 we counted a record 2,160 razorbills on Ramsey and the Bishops and Clerks.
1,723 on Ramsey and 437 on the Bishops and Clerks (a small string of islands that lie just off Ramsey and form part of the reserve boundary)
Razorbill counts on Ramsey dating back to when RSPB took ownership in 1993 (prior to this there are sporadic numbers, most in the low hundreds)
This is the first time razorbills have been over 2,000 and mirrors increases seen on nearby Skomer and Skokholm over the past decade too. This is encouraging news as seabirds in general are not faring well in other parts of the UK, changes in sea temperatures linked to climate change having negative impacts on prey availability. Pembrokeshire continues to buck the trend for most seabird species and it is vitally important we continue to monitor our birds as they are the barometer for change in our fragile ocean environment.
Next up we will take a look at how guillemots did this year......