We worry about our puffins. We worry a lot and not without good cause. Our puffins have probably been in trouble since humans and their hangers on, the rats, dogs, cats and ferrets that follow them, first turned up in Jersey. Or walked along the peninsula presumably. And it’s not like the puffins could have been totally casual in their choices of nest sites before arrival of humans – wolves, foxes, stoats and weasels didn’t need us to show them where the seabirds were. Picking places to breed where wolves can’t get to is probably a lot easier than choosing rat-free ones. It’s a surprise that the burrow-nesting puffin even made it this far – nowhere else will they nest where rats are even vaguely close by.

Unfortunately our actual records of puffins in Jersey are pretty poor. Everyone “knows” there were once lots although no one ever actually counted them. Or looked in their nest burrows. Or even it seems, really, confirmed that they actually bred here at all – puffin chicks are reared underground and, abandoned by their parents, leave the burrow alone and at night. They fly straight out to sea and away, never really ever seeing their parents as it was dark in the nest where they grew up. It’s perhaps no surprise then that we never see the little ones, the pufflings, either.

That Jersey’s puffins, like those in France have gone down numbers further in recent years is quite clear and, in 2015, Kaja Heising even wondered if the puffin’s time in Jersey was finally up. That the bird of many a local t-shirt, souvenir and local television show would be lost for ever. I further suggested that in Jersey we risked emulating Mauritius’s relationship with the dodo – an island using an extinct bird as an icon.

Jersey’s puffins are pretty well the most southerly of their kind in the world. The one colony below us, Rouzic in Brittany, has itself suffered. Not least in their case as gannets have moved into their neighbourhood and taken over. Interestingly it’s possible that puffins don’t really get kicked out by gannets but that all that burrowing will eventually remove the topsoil they need, making it useless for puffins but lovely for gannets (like they did on the Welsh island of Grassholm). The puffin may be rare amongst nature in that it, like us, can completely destroy the home it needs most.

The southern-most puffins are also finding the seas around them getting warmer as the climate changes. British waters, already grossly overfished, are now seeing new fish species that were once rare this far north (witness the change of moulting sites of the Balearic shearwater), fish not all to the liking of puffins, particularly not for the pufflings.

So, what of our puffins? Have they finally gone from Jersey? Well, that’s the thing, they’re still here. Not many but where there’s hope etc. This year there are eight pairs it seems, and everything suggests that they are at least trying to nest and breed successfully. Of course, our puffins can’t burrow into the soil as they’d like to as the rats would get them, so they pick inaccessible cracks in the rock that they can fly into. Local ecologist Piers Sangan and top birder, Mick Dryden, are watching the puffins like no one has done before in Jersey, mapping them and trying to understand their behaviour while in our waters. Piers reports both members of one pair flying into one rock crevice carrying fish – to feed an unseen baby? That sounds like a probable breeding to me – our first record at last?

And what of the threats, do we know more about these? We know that our birds are unlikely to access somewhere to burrow thanks to the attentions of unwanted mammals. But how bad is this and how many of the pesky mammals are there on the cliff tops? Invasive mammals expert Kirsty Swinnerton is planning to find out and think up ways perhaps of getting rid of them. Or at least keeping them safely away from the birds. Local expert, and chough monitor, Keith Pyman has also wondered whether our fulmars, which colonised Jersey in the 1970s, might not be blame-free too. At least in not helping the precarious position of our puffins.

Fulmars are never normally any threat to nesting puffins but these petrels, who can spit some pretty foul stomach contents at anyone annoying them, probably don’t normally get that close to burrowing puffins. However, here in Jersey, fulmars nest on the ledges and mouths of cracks and crevices – do they block the puffins’ nests? Puffins find it hard enough to approach their Jersey homes anyway (puffins in big grassy colonies simply throw themselves into the ground and run to the burrow) those using small rock crevices find the precision approach difficult without the threat of the spitting fulmar. Keith has noted fulmars in the places where in years past he saw puffins disappearing underground.

Our puffins are still hanging on and you can see the sightings on the Jersey Birds website along with updates on our small number of razorbills, some over-summering guillemots and, somewhat weirdly, the fine black guillemot enjoying our summer with its (reluctant?) razorbill friends. As noted above, where there’s hope there’s a way, so let’s give our puffins some support. With a better understanding of the numbers and locations of all our birds and the true level of threats that they face we may be able to devise some strategies to stop the puffin’s disappearance, ways that might need everyone to remember just how much they love puffins.

The UK Government has released a report assessing bird populations across the UK between 1970 and 2015 particularly in selected and vulnerable groups: farmland, woodland, water and seabirds

Why should governments monitor bird populations?

Bird populations have long been considered to provide a good indication of the broad state of wildlife in the UK. This is because they occupy a wide range of habitats and respond to environmental pressures that also operate on other groups of wildlife. In addition, there are considerable long-term data on trends in bird populations, allowing for comparison between short term and long term. Because they are a well-studied taxonomic group, drivers of change for birds are better understood than for other species groups, which enables better interpretation of any observed changes. Birds also have huge cultural importance and are highly valued as a part of the UK’s natural environment by the general public. However, the bird indicators presented in this publication are not intended, in isolation, as indicators of the health of the natural environment more widely. It is not possible to determine changes in the actual number of birds for each species in the UK each year, it is possible to estimate the relative change, from counts on sample plots surveyed as part of a range of national monitoring schemes just as Birds On The Edge and others do in Jersey.

Trends in bird populations are used by policy makers, government agencies and nongovernmental organisations as part of the evidence base to assess the effects of environmental management, such as agricultural practices, on bird populations. The trends are also used to assess the effectiveness of environmental interventions intended to address declines, such as agri-environment schemes targeted at farmland birds.

Understanding the bird population indices

Individual bird species population trends, based on expert surveys, are calculated as an index. This relates the population in a given year to a ‘baseline’ – the first year that data are available – which is given a value of 100. Thereafter, the index is expressing the population as a percentage of this ‘baseline’.

This annual Defra National Statistics Release presents data trends up to 2015 in populations of common birds (species with a population of at least 500 breeding pairs) that are native to, and breed in, the UK, with trends overall and for four main habitat groups (see Annex A in the report for a list of birds in each group). The release also presents trends for wintering waterbirds, some of which also breed in the UK. The charts presented combine individual species indices into a single indicator to provide an overall trend for each group mentioned above. The indices are considered to give reliable medium to long-term trends but strong reliance should not be attached to short term changes from year to year.

Assessing the trends

Two trends are referred to in the text: the unsmoothed indices show year-to-year fluctuation in populations, reflecting the observed changes in the survey results; and smoothed trends, which are used to formally assess the statistical significance of change over time. Smoothed trends are used for both long and short term assessments as they reduce the short-term peaks and troughs resulting from, for example, year to year weather and sampling variations. The most recent year of data, i.e. 2015 in this update, is likely to change due to the smoothing process following the inclusion of 2016 data in next year’s update. As a result it is not appropriate to make assessments based on this figure. Where results from the smoothed indices are quoted, this is clearly indicated.

Executive summary

The combined all species index has changed little compared with 40 years ago in the UK, however, this masks considerable flux, with some species increasing and some species decreasing in population size. These changes in relative abundance tend to cancel each other out in the combined index.

In 2015:

• The all-species index in the UK was 2% below its 1970 value
• There were less than half the number of farmland birds than in 1970, most of this decline occurred between the late seventies and early eighties
• There were 18% less woodland birds than in 1970
• Water and wetland bird numbers were 7% lower than in 1975
• There were 22% less seabirds compared to 1986
• The number of wintering waterbirds was 88% higher than in 1975-76, the index peaked in 2001 and has declined since.

Between 2009 and 2014:

• The smoothed all species index remained level
• Farmland birds smoothed index decreased 8%
• The number of woodland birds did not change significantly, although the unsmoothed index dipped to the lowest figure ever recorded in 2013 before recovering
• The smoothed water and wetland bird index declined by 7%
• The number of seabirds declined 6%, in 2013 numbers dipped to the lowest ever but have since increased slightly
• The smoothed wintering water bird index fell 8%.

Download the report Wild bird populations in the UK, 1970-2015 here

From BTO

The main theme of The State of the UK’s Birds report (SUKB) 2016 is the latest Birds of Conservation Concern 4 list – BoCC4 published in 2015 (read and download here) – and the species whose status has changed. The increase in the UK’s Red list by 15 species is due to problems in all habitats including farmland, woodland and coasts but most notably in uplands with five new upland species moving onto the red list. One of these is curlew. The UK supports 27% of the global population, and the long-term trend shows a 64% decline from 1970 to 2014. This, combined with the bird’s global status of Near Threatened, suggests that the curlew is one of the most pressing bird conservation priorities in the UK (read more about the curlew here).

“The BTO is working with others on a programme of research to understand the causes of curlew decline and guide potential management solutions. This involves analyses of long-term data collected by thousands of volunteers, using novel tracking technology to study the needs of individual birds, and working with local enthusiasts to inform the recovery of local populations” 
– James Pearce-Higgins, Director of Science, BTO

Upland birds

Whinchat, another largely upland species monitored by the UK and Channel Islands BBS Survey shows a 53% decline during the last two decades.  As an Afro-Palearctic migrant, this species is part of another group for which there is particular concern. Threats and pressures during migration and on the wintering grounds need to be considered alongside the impact of changes in upland habitats in the UK.

More unexpected perhaps, is that grey wagtail has moved from the Amber list to the Red list. Alongside declines in common sandpiper and dipper, this raises wider concerns about species associated with upland streams and rivers. The other two upland species to show marked declines are merlin and dotterel, the latter a montane species likely to affected negatively by climate change and grazing pressure.

Scarce and rare breeding species

As well as the annual update of changes in widespread breeding species based mainly on the BBS, SUKB 2016 once again includes a summary of trends in scarce and rare breeding species, drawn mainly from the annual reports of the Rare Breeding Bird Panel (RBBP) and the SCARABBS programme of periodic surveys.

Of the 91 species reported on in the most recent RBBP report covering 2014, 71 were assessed by BoCC4. Eight species showed an improvement in status (including woodlark, bearded tit and chough, which joined the Green list), with conservation action to maintain suitable reed beds helping the populations of species such as bittern recover. Five species, common pochard, Slavonian grebe, merlin, dotterel and black redstart moved onto the Red list. The remaining 20 of the 91, not assessed by BoCC4, are those which are not considered to be a regular component of the UK’s avifauna. This may be because they breed only occasionally (e.g. European bee-eater), or indeed have never bred, but from time-to-time visiting individuals exhibit breeding behaviour (e.g. great reed warbler). The RBBP logs such occurrences, as it may be that they represent a precursor to future colonisation, such as the first little egrets that displayed to each other in the early 1990s, before first breeding in 1996 and the subsequent population explosion.

The importance of volunteer data

Thousands of dedicated volunteers contributed to the data used throughout most of this report. Data used to calculate UK population trends and related research. Over 2,600 volunteers participated in the Breeding Bird Survey in 2016 alone, one of many surveys highlighted in the report. This particular survey provides annual population trends for 111 species, including upland species such as curlew, whinchat and grey wagtail.

At a smaller, but equally as important scale, the 258 volunteers who contribute to the Waterways Breeding Bird Survey allow monitoring on those species specific to waterways, such as common sandpiper and dipper and cover almost 300 sites annually.

Who produces the report

SUKB is produced by a coalition of three non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – the RSPB, BTO and the WWT – and the UK Government’s statutory nature conservation agencies – Natural Resources Wales (NRW), Natural England (NE), the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, Northern Ireland (DAERA), Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC).

Download the full report The State of the UK’s Birds 2016 here