BIRDWATCH IRELAND, the country’s largest wildlife conservation organisation, has called for a thorough study of the country’s important seabird populations amid fears that the decline seen in seabird numbers in Scottish colonies may be occurring here.
Last year, most of the puffins on the Great Skellig or Skellig Michael off Co Kerry did not rear young, according to Siobhán Egan, BirdWatch policy officer.
Skellig Michael and other locations in Kerry including neighbouring Puffin Island account for about half the total population of 21,000 pairs of puffins counted in the BirdWatch Ireland Seabird Survey between 1998 and 2002.
The most likely cause for the decline was starvation. Birdwatchers were alarmed at reports the puffins were bringing snake pipefish to nests to feed their young instead of the regular sand eels and sprats, she said. Pipefish, bony and difficult to digest, are not as valuable a food source.
Ms Egan said it might be that the pipefish are more abundant in our waters due to changes in climate or other factors, but it is also not known for certain whether the preferred prey of sand eels and sprats are less available.
“We know very little about the habitat requirements of these prey species apart from their need for sand banks as nursery beds,” she said. There was pressure to use sandbanks as offshore windfarms.
This country hosts a significant proportion of Europe’s seabird populations, including some 10 per cent of manx shearwaters, 70 per cent of European storm petrels and 12 per cent of gannets.
Other countries such as Norway have large puffin populations. In recent years colonies of kittiwakes and arctic terns on the Shetland and Orkney Islands have shown significant declines, and increasingly snake pipefish were being brought in by adults to feed their young, it has emerged.
Anecdotal evidence so far this year suggests the puffins have been rearing their young in 2008, according to Ms Egan, but there is a need for a new assessment of seabird activity to monitor health, population numbers and diet.
The body is lobbying the National Parks and Wildlife Service of the Department of the Environment for funding for a programme of works including a monitoring project on the most critical seabird Special Protection Areas. Ideally this should be in place by the 2009 breeding season.