Shag (Phalacrocorax aristotelis) (Photo By Andreas Trepte – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15765052)

Dear Readers, as you know I’ve been looking at the birds that are on the Red List – birds of conservation concern in the UK. Well, it’s not all bad news – the Shag, a rather elegant seabird, has improved its fortunes and is now on the Amber list. Unfortunately, a further five seabirds are now on the list, and they include some species that we’re all familiar with if we’ve taken a coastal holiday in the UK. The causes of their decline are many and various – over-fishing, the loss of sand eels, tiny fish that many creatures rely on, the unpredictable effects of climate change and the destruction of habitat, both in the UK and in the countries that the birds migrate to and from. But the final straw for many populations in the past few years has been avian flu, which has wiped out whole generations of birds in many locations. I’ll look at the specific problems of individual species when I get to them in my individual blogs, but here’s a quick summary of the birds that have joined the Red List this week, a club that no one ever wants to be a member of.

First up, the Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus) – this is the largest member of the Gull family, described as ‘the King of the Atlantic’. You can see this bruiser eating ducklings in St James’s Park, or scouring the quayside for discarded fish more or less anywhere.

Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus) Photo By Spinus Nature Photography (Spinusnet) – Own work: Spinus Nature Photography Greater black-backed gull, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46140374)

Next, the elegant Arctic Tern joins the Roseate Tern on the Red List. This species has the longest migration of any animal, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back twice a year, You can see them at Walthamstow Wetlands, of all places! Terns are amongst my favourite birds – they remind me of sea swallows.

Arctic Tern(Sterna paradisaea) Photo bypjt56 , CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The Great Skua is known as the Bonxie in Scotland, and what a ferocious pirate it is, stealing food from smaller seabirds as they come into their nest sites. They will also think nothing of beating up humans who go too close to their nests. Heavy billed and beetle-browed, they are birds that no one would want to mess with, and yet they’re still in trouble.

Great Skua (Stercorarius skua) defending its nest site (Photo by By Erik Christensen – With permission from: Murray Nurse, Guildford , England, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9508570)

You wouldn’t think that the Common Gull would be less than common, but so it appears. It joins the Herring Gull on the Red List. Described as a ‘smaller, gentler version of the Herring Gull’, this bird is also known as a ‘Mew Gull’, in reference to its call. In the breeding season the adults develop a red ring around their dark eyes.

Common gull (Larus canus) Photo by By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=134641231

And finally, there’s Leach’s Storm Petrel. They spend most of their lives at sea, coming to land only to breed. They nest on remote offshore islands in the North Atlantic, where they are vulnerable to introduced mammalian predators, such as rats and mice. They return to their nests at night – in this they remind me of the Cory’s Shearwaters that I saw in the Azores earlier this year. What enigmatic birds they are, and so vulnerable! There is a large population of the species in Eastern Canada and other parts of the Western North Atlantic, but it is worrying to think that they may disappear from our shores altogether.

Leach’s Storm Petrel (Hydrobates leucorhous) Photo by Aaron Maizlish https://www.flickr.com/photos/amaizlish/41672082940)

So, there’s the news, and depressing it is too. Nonetheless, there is some hope – I am pleased by the recent decision to stop sand eel ‘harvesting’ in British waters, for example, and there are signs that the Avian Flu epidemic might be burning itself out. Finding out  the precise cause of the declines in each species is absolutely key to helping to conserve it, as was proved in the case of the cirl bunting. Let’s hope we can find out before the species go past the point of no return.