Being a terrestrial species, its hard for us to fathom how it might be to live almost entirely from the sea. Withstanding storms without places to shelter, navigating vast expanses of open water, and diving into cold depths throughout each day — the lives of our seabirds are not something we readily relate to. Despite our affection for puffins, the poster child of Ireland’s seabird colonies, we still don’t pay much attention when the future of their existence is threatened.
A new pan-European report published recently has found that diminishing fish stocks are making survival ever more challenging for puffins, gannets, razorbills, manx shearwaters, fulmars and all terns, among others.
These seabirds have evolved to catch fish… every bone in their bodies is literally adapted to this task. Gannets, for example, have a skull that has evolved with in-built air pockets to protect their brain from the impact of hitting the water at 100 km per hour. Irish waters are a hotspot for gannets. The breeding colony on Little Skellig is the second largest in the world, with nearly 30,000 pairs breeding there each summer. Other gannet colonies include the Saltee islands off County Wexford; Bull Rock off Cork; Clare Island off Mayo and a small colony on the rocky stack of Ireland’s Eye in Dublin Bay.
These seabirds are travellers, migrating impressive distances throughout the year. Manx shearwaters, for example, spend most of their lives at sea but return to land to breed in burrows so that their chicks are protected from predators. Most of the breeding colonies here are now on uninhabited off-shore islands such as the Great Blasket Island off the Dingle peninsula and the Saltees off County Wexford. At the end of the summer, manx shearwaters travel all the way to the South Atlantic, spending their days at sea off the coasts of Argentina and Brazil, a journey of 7000 miles that they manage to complete in just a few weeks.
As top predators, facing the many challenges of life at sea, these seabirds have evolved to live long lives, taking time to learn the skills that survival requires. They take several years to reach sexual maturity, produce fewer chicks, and care for each chick for longer than is typical in the world of birds. Each pair of gannets, for example, produces just one chick per year, feeding it for a full 90 days before it is ready to fledge in September.
Despite having worked well throughout the millions of years of their evolution, these traits are now making seabirds especially vulnerable to recent human induced threats. When a gannet gets trapped in a trawler’s net, for example, hauled in as fishery bycatch, the loss of life of a single bird has a greater impact on the population as a whole than a shorter-lived species with a higher reproductive rate.
A recent major study revealed that globally, seabirds have declined overall by 70% in the last 50 years and are currently one of the most threatened groups of birds in the world. A new Seabirds of Europe report by BirdLife International highlights both declines and potential solutions. The report finds that more than a third of seabirds (38%) in Europe have decreasing trends, while one in three species is threatened with extinction. Atlantic puffins are one of the species singled out in the report because of the worryingly downward trends in their population.
The pressures that have led to this dire situation include collapsing fish stocks from overfishing, mortality through fisheries bycatch, increasing sea temperatures and severity of storms as a consequence of climate change, energy infrastructure including wind farm construction, and avian influenza, also known as bird flu. Bird flu has existed since at least the 19th century, but the recent scale and severity of its impact on wild bird populations is unprecedented.
Increasingly intensive poultry farms, combined with declining resilience of seabirds due to the other threats, is proving a recipe for disaster. In 2023, gannets, razorbills, common terns and Arctic terns were found to be among the species most affected by bird flu. The cumulative effect of many threats is what has caused such severity of seabird declines in recent decades.
Despite the complexity of threats, many of the solutions are known and within reach. What is needed is urgent scaling up of existing conservation responses. The announcement earlier this year of a new ‘Seas off Wexford’ Special Protection Area (SPA) is certainly welcome news, as protected areas can be among the most effective conservation and management tools to protect vulnerable marine life. The application of actual protection within these areas is, however crucial. Protection in theory does not always translate to protection in practice, the detail of how commercial and extractive activities are regulated is key to the success of designations. Harmful activities such as blasting, drilling, dredging, sediment removal, and other extractive operations have to be prohibited to allow species and habitats to recover.
Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have been repeatedly shown to be effective at protecting not only the life within the boundaries of the designation, but also giving a significant boost to marine life in the waters surrounding the MPA. If we are to have any hope of slowing the declines in our most cherished seabirds, more protected areas are needed. This makes delays in publishing the long-awaited Marine Protected Areas bill especially alarming. This eagerly anticipated bill was expected early last year, with the Government repeatedly pledging that the bill is forthcoming. However, unspecified delays have left many scratching their heads as to what’s happening behind the scenes.
In addition to protected areas, reducing overfishing is a nettle that collective governments must grasp. Seabirds are entirely dependent on there being an adequate supply of fish to sustain them, right across their range. Successful chick rearing requires waters rich in pollack, mackerel, whiting, sprat, krill, and herring. While some species travel far out to sea during this time, others specifically need good shoals within the feeding range of nesting colonies. Overfishing by industrial trawlers continues to deprive seabirds, and other marine life, of the rich fish stocks that have sustained them for many thousands of years. In this way, seabirds are valuable indicators of how healthy our seas are.
We know there is much we can do to increase the chances that puffins, gannets, manx shearwaters and terns will continue to exist 50 years from now. Actions across all fronts are urgently required.
