Hi everyone, I'm Georgina, the final long term volunteer of the 2026 season. I arrived on Skomer just last week and very luckily, I seem to be here just in time to watch the end of the guillemot and razorbill breeding season with the cliffs thinning out more and more every day.
The first guillemots started laying their eggs back at the start of May, and after incubating them for around a month (28-33 days) we had our first fluffy chicks!
After 16 to 21 days, our guillemot chicks are ready to go out to sea with their dads. But at this stage they haven't yet developed their flying feathers, and so the only way for them to get down off those cliffs is to jump into the sea! Some chicks are very lucky and the adults will walk them down some ledges to get slightly lower and closer to the sea, but some of them have a long way to go. The dads will sit in the water calling up to their chicks to jump, and it seems like sometimes they're a little impatient, in a hurry to get back out to sea.
The chicks will waddle right to the edge of their ledges, and they seem to muster up all their courage to take a big flying jump off the cliff ledge and into the water! At this stage, they're still very fluffy and have lots of air in their feathers and so pop right up out of the water like a cork. Their dads will swim over to them (after they've identified which chick is theirs), and they'll swim off out to sea to learn how to be a guillemot.
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| A late stage guillemot chick surrounded by adults on a cliff edge. |
Bella, one of our on island researchers, has been watching the guillemot colony over on the Amos every day since May in order to determine the productivity of the colony. The productivity is determined by the percentage of eggs that make it all the way through fluffy chick then jumpling, to leaving the cliffs. This is monitoring that happens every year in order to create a long term dataset on the population trends in this colony!
"Guillemots are really good parents, they diligently feed and defend their chicks from other adult guillemots. Their productivity is really high, with the main threats coming from exposure or from some black-backed gull predation" - Bella
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| The Amos, a large guillemot colony, with thousands of birds perched on the rock. |
Guillemots can be quite territorial, even if their territory only reaches to a beak's width around them. You will often see some scrambling on the ledges when two adults cross into each other's territory. This can make it a little bit difficult to land, as if you don't land in exactly the right place, your neighbour may push you back off the cliff!
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| Someone landed on a ledge that didn't belong to them, and a small tussle ensued |
There are a few small fluffy chicks left on our cliffs, with some very attentive parents looking out for them, and some non-breeding adults hanging around to provide safety in numbers. But within the next few weeks, we will wish them farewell and safe travels out offshore, where they'll spend the winter bobbing about and diving down to 180m for their food! Guillemots are one of the deepest diving birds, and they've even been detected off submarines!
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| Two chicks huddled together, both still relatively small. |
Although sad that many of our summer birds are making their way back out to sea, we've not seen the last of the majority of the species on the island. Our first fulmar chick was spotted a few days ago and some of our autumn birds are returning, with recent sightings of blackcaps! I'm excited to see what the rest of the season brings!
Georgina (LTV 2026)