Anyone who’s been anywhere near Skomer would know that we have quite a few birds on the island- swarms of them you could say! Our task is to work out just how many there really are and who’s doing what.
Possibly the biggest job is the seabird counting season in
the first 3 weeks of June. Yas, who joined us this year to help, explains what
we do in the last blog post (Bad
weather made for an auk-ward seabird counting season!). Earlier in the year
we shared that we’ve had another record-breaking puffin count at 52,019 birds. The
counting of puffins is really different to the other seabirds, and it’s something
that many visitors ask about. The simple story is - we count all the puffins in
sections around the island, everything on land, on the water and flying. Add
the totals from all the sections together and tah-dah we have a full island
count! There is slightly more to it than
that, so for a full description, see past Visitor Officer, Beth’s post from
2023- Clickers
at the ready.
We also count all the gulls on the island, mostly carried out by Mike & Ted, who bring a huge amount of experience, enthusiasm (and treats!) when they visit for a week or so in mid-May. Have a look for their blog posts which mention the counts and all the migrant and rare birds they manage to spot too! (E.g. Gull Counts 2025)
But there’s plenty more than seabirds that we need to count on the island and there’s a few other surveys we do annually to try and work out what’s going on. The most insightful of these is probably the breeding bird surveys (BBS), carried out in the spring. These are repeated surveys across the island to record breeding behaviour of all bird species. We have 8 sections across the island which we survey 4 times; in early and late April and May. During the surveys we walk a set route across the section, starting 30 minutes after sunrise, and record onto maps all birds we see and their behaviour. They’re gorgeous mornings, as we can only do the surveys in clear, calm weather, so it usually starts with a stunning sunrise and then a couple of hours slowly walking and listening for birds, what can be better?!
.jpg)
Over the surveys we’re looking for birds appearing in the
same places and for evidence of them breeding. Any birds singing, carrying food
or nest material or having arguments with neighbours are all clear signs of
breeding, but we also record simple presence and calling. After all the surveys
are complete (and we’ve got through the madness of June!) we sit down with all
4 maps and create a new master map with all the breeding territories on. This
starts off easily, with birds clearly breeding, but then come the trickier ones
- calling multiple times, but not singing, or present a few times but only
singing once. Having other sightings of these birds also really helps, e.g. if
we have seen fledglings in this area at another point, that gives us a very
good clue! Then from these master maps
we get a total number of breeding birds of each species across the whole island.
The daily bird
log is also crucial alongside these surveys for forming the whole picture.
Every evening at 8pm we sit down with staff, volunteers and hostel guests and
record all the birds, insects, mammals and other wildlife, in addition to the boats and light aircraft that have been
seen around the island. This has been going since the 1960s and makes a big contribution
to our monitoring, having extra eyes across the island to spot breeding
behaviours or even chicks! That’s just the tip of the iceberg of the monitoring
we do on the island, but we’ll say more about everything else in other blogs.
Diolch yn fawr!
Izzy (Seasonal Assistant
Warden)