UK Seabird Breeding Collapse Disastrous, Absolutely Unprecedented

[hatrack]

"They are disaster zones: professional ornithologists who have spent their careers monitoring the teeming, screaming bird life of Orkney and Shetland have never seen anything like it. On cliff ledges, on moorlands, on shingle banks, the nesting attempts of hundreds of thousands of seabirds in Scotland's Northern Isles have come to grief in the summer of 2004.

It is the year without young. Eggs have not been laid; where eggs have been laid, they have not hatched; where they have hatched, the chicks have died in the nest, and the tiny numbers of chicks that have left the nest have not lasted long.

A giant ecosystem that has functioned for millions of years has broken down. The reason is starvation, and the reason for the starvation is thought to be climate change: this is a taste of things to come. There have been seabird nesting failures in the Northern Isles before, but the extent of this year's catastrophe is entirely unprecedented.

On the island of Papa Westray in Orkney, for example, only five of the 85 nests of kittiwakes had chicks earlier this month. On the island of Foula, which has the world's largest colony of great skuas, scientists checking a representative sample of 400 nest sites found just two chicks, which were thought unlikely to survive. At a cliff near Sumburgh Head on Shetland's southern tip, where 1,200 pairs of guillemots assembled to breed in the spring, not a single chick has been produced. Arctic terns, of which the last census in 2000 recorded 24,716 breeding pairs in Shetland, have produced no chicks at all in the south of the islands, according to Peter Ellis, the local representative of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. "In the whole of Shetland they have produced just a handful," he said."

EDIT

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=546129

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Remember the Alfred Hitchcock movie, "The Birds"?

The premise never had much credibility for me because I couldn't see why birds would amass against humans. Until now, of course. Now, if birds only had the intelligence to tie-in cause and effect... But that's not likely to happen before Republicans do.

[blindpig]

2. an anecdote

I was out on a head boat in the Gulf Stream off of Little River Inlet last week. Between bouts of seasickness caused by 8' seas I observed an adult Northern Fulmar. I believe it's a good bit early for that species to be at that latitude.Abandoned it's breeding ground perhaps?

[shadu]

3. Don't let them take my Puffins!

I love Puffins.

This news stuns me.
How will these birds make a
come back?

[phantom power]

4. maybe they won't come back.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. Shrub Bush will be remembered for many things, esp. Global Climate Change

Shrub Bush will be remembered for many things, none of them flattering. High on the list will be his status as the last great Global Climate Change Denier. (Some consonance with Holocaust Denier, which he is not, but good meme construction).