Assessing the 2013 Atlantic Puffin wreck

Three weeks on from the first reports of a puffin ‘wreck’ in Eastern Scotland and NE England CEH’s seabird ecology team are beginning to assess the longer term impact on the overall population. With help from members of the public and organisations such as the RSPB, SNH and the Scottish Seabird Centre we’ve been able to put together a map of locations where dead birds have been reported. Other species have also been found dead on the beaches of the East Coast, including guillemots, razorbills, shags and kittiwakes.

Google Map showing locations of reported seabird 'wrecks'

View 2013 Puffin wreck in a larger map

There are now two key questions: why did it happen and what impact will it have on the populations?

Prof Mike Harris writes, “All the Puffins we have examined so far have been emaciated, had empty stomachs, atrophied breast muscles and lacking subcutaneous and mesenteric fat – in other words the proximate cause of death appears to be starvation. Deciding whether this was due to lack of food, an inability to feed efficiently or to some other factor(s) is much more tricky.”

Later this month (in the week starting 29^th April) CEH scientists and volunteers will carry out an assessment of the puffin population on the Isle of May. We have been monitoring seabird populations on the Isle of May for more than 40 years, and carry out a full count every five years, so by July we hope to know the effects of the 2013 wreck at this colony. As more than half the corpses were of breeding age we expect adult survival to be lower than normal. However, whether this will result in a measurable decrease in numbers breeding is unclear.

Another serious wreck (in 1983) did not result in a demonstrable reduction in breeding numbers of puffins on the Isle of May. However in the 1980s the population was increasing rapidly. The last puffin count on the Isle of May (in 2008) showed that the population was no longer increasing, so it remains to be seen whether it is still sufficiently resilient to cope with the 2013 wreck or if breeding numbers will decline.

Prof Mike Harris and Prof Sarah Wanless of CEH have written a detailed article on the 2013 ‘wreck’ which will be published in the next issue of British Birds (1 May) and also on the British Birds website.

Additional information

Images of the puffin 'wreck' as well as images of puffins on the Isle of May can be found in our recently updated 2013 Puffin 'wreck' Flickr set.

CEH's Seabird Ecology research  

RSPB Scotland

Scottish Natural Heritage

Scottish Seabird Centre

We're going on a Bug Hunt!

Two of our PhD students, Scott McKenzie and Helen Hicks, were out and about at Brownsover Community School near Rugby this week, where they organised and led a hugely successful Bug Day. Read Scott's account of the day below:

"Why do ladybirds have spots?"

I was stumped. It was all going so well! In the past, I'd fended away probing questions from top academics at international conferences regarding my own PhD. Previously that morning, I had explained why some caterpillars were brightly coloured but others just looked like sticks, but this one had me scuppered. I came up with a few possibilities, avoiding going into too much detail about Natural Selection. The seven-year-old ecological prodigy seemed satisfied with my response and we moved on. Phew! 

I was at Brownsover Community School and in front of me were 60 cross-legged six and seven-year-olds eager for information on the favourite bugs and beasties. Some months previously I had been asked to organise a “Bug Day” at the school near Rugby. With the recent cold weather I realised that undertaking such a venture could be quite a challenge, as not much insect life will be out-and-about. Regardless, I jumped in with both feet. I have worked with children before and it is incredibly rewarding to think (if slightly naively) that you are inspiring the next generation of ecologists – the perfect pick-me-up to the recent miserable weather! I set about organising an action-packed and fun-filled day for the children.

 

Children from Brownsover Community School look for
minibeasts around their school, armed with ID sheets
and pooters.

The morning session consisted of an interactive presentation that illustrated the diversity of insects all over the world, ranging from stag beetles to pond skaters and katydids to termites. The ID skills of many of the children were impressive to say the least, with one child correctly identifying a water scorpion! The same child informed the rest of the class that a woodlouse was not an insect and was more closely related to a lobster. Pupils and teachers alike looked at me expecting to say how wrong he was, but I nodded in agreement, impressed.

Pupils line up to empty their minibeast finds for the whole
class to admire.

A drawing task followed the barrage of questions the presentation had evoked. Using what they had just learnt about the diversity of insects, I asked them to draw their “Ultimate Bug”. I wanted them to tell me where it lived, what it ate and what special features they had. They could draw on all the attributes we had just been discussing; some had huge eyes on stalks and were covered in spines, others lived in water and ate fish (but still had huge wings!). One even had no eyes because it just lived in tunnels eating worms. Needless to say their imagination ran riot and they came up with some interesting and spectacular specimens. 

The next task was a classic “bug hunt”. With pooter and ID sheets in hand they set about stone-turning and leaf-litter-rummaging around the school grounds in search of some of the minibeasts they had seen during the morning. To encourage concentrated searching we had hidden a number of plastic bugs around the school in places where invertebrates might be concealed. If a pupil found one, they were rewarded with a wiggly worm (sweet). After 45 minutes we had amassed an impressive array of bugs and beasties, including 7-spot ladybirds and some impressive looking centipedes. By this time tummies were rumbling and lunch was upon us.

Here's one I made earlier...

The afternoon task was to make themselves a self-contained decomposer community from a 2-litre plastic bottle. In true Blue Peter style, I had taken in “one I had made earlier” (it is now adorning my desk in the CEH student room). The top of the bottle was cut off and filled with a handful of soil and some dead leaves and sticks. The children then added their own detritivorous invertebrates including woodlice and millipedes. I’ve always thought it is easy to enthuse kids about certain minibeasts: colourful butterflies and pretty ladybirds, for example. I think it’s much more difficult to get them excited about drab, dull things.  I had my work cut out, but I think I managed to win them over! Sooner or later they were handling woodlice as excitedly as if they were exotics in a zoo! 

Pupils create their very own decomposer mesocosm,
 with a little help from Helen Hicks.

Pupils inspecting a decomposer community
mesocosm, and realising how awesome
woodlice are!

Whilst some held woodlice, others were peering into water-filled trays containing various aquatic invertebrates we had collected the previous day. There were lots of “wriggly things” and also many things “that looked like some stones”, all of which were received well by the children. Also on this “hands-on” table were some stick insects I had acquired the week previous. Once one child had an insect clambering over their hand they encouraged other, more timid, children to do the same. After a short while the stick insects had made their way over the hands of most of the children (and some braver teachers) in the class. It was great seeing children impart their knowledge onto their peers. This was mainly in the form of “you have to be gentle with them as their legs might come off”. Thankfully, no stick insects succumbed to this fate and all the children were, indeed, gentle.

It was fast approaching the end of the school day and all that was left was to suggest a few things they could do around their own gardens and the school to help insects. This included planting wild flowers and butterfly-friendly plants and building somewhere nice and warm for bugs to overwinter. I had been genuinely impressed with the high levels of enthusiasm and attentiveness shown by all the pupils throughout the day and I rewarded the top entomologist with their own mini-microscope. 

Happy (and exhausted!) ecologists with
satisfied pupils.

It was an incredibly rewarding and satisfying day for all, if quite tiring! I really do think it emphasises the importance of speaking to children about ecology in a fun and informative way. It was an equally educational day for us and I have learnt much from the experience. I'm looking forward to similar opportunities in the future!  

Scott McKenzie and Helen Hicks

See more photos in our Flickr set

CEH science at the EGU 2013 General Assembly

Scientists from CEH are joining 11,000 others at the EGU annual assembly in Vienna this week to present progress and results from a range of hydrological and other projects.

The annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union, running until Friday 12 April, is the place to meet every kind of earth, atmosphere and ocean scientist and even get the latest data from the Curiosity rover on Mars. It's one of the two largest annual gatherings of geo-scientists in the world, with participants from almost 100 countries.

Hydrology is always a feature, along with volcanology, planetary and earth science, atmosphere, climate, energy and resources. CEH’s hydrology-related presentations and posters will highlight our latest research in floods, droughts and predicting hydrological change.

Chris Taylor is presenting his work that shows afternoon rain is more likely over drier soils (relating to his recent Nature paper) and convening a session on African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis.

Ilaria Prosdocimi will explain a case study based on old Ordnance Survey maps that could take UK flood estimation forward from a steady state model to allow for the effects of increasing urbanisation and climate variability on flood risk.

Jamie Hannaford’s poster describes a unique international dataset, a network of more than 1200 “Reference” catchments (undisturbed by human activities like reservoirs and urbanisation) across Europe and North America where we can identify natural, climate-driven changes in river flow regimes. Jamie and his co-workers will use this broad network to quantify long-term changes in the frequency of major floods (events that occur on average every 25 to 100 years) for the first time on a continental scale.

Ignazio Giuntoli, a PhD student with CEH and the University of Birmingham, will present a poster looking at several models to assess future water security. Early results from two of the models suggest that water deficit is expected to increase in two “hotspots”: Northern Latin America and Southern Europe.

Bob Moore is convening a session on Friday on Hydrological forecasting: challenges in uncertainty estimation, data assimilation, post-processing and decision-making.

Thomas Kjeldsen, a co-author of several presentations on improving our understanding of European flood hydrology, is not attending but has just been appointed an Editor of the EGU journal Hydrology & Earth System Sciences (HESS).

CEH science is also represented beyond hydrology.  In a session on energy, resources and the environment, Niall McNamara reports on initial findings from a project investigating greenhouse gas balances of land use transitions into energy crops, while Andrew Robertson presents on carbon dioxide emissions for a Miscanthus plantation. Meanwhile, Mike Billett and colleagues' research on peatlands and the carbon cycle is also being presented.

Finally, CEH Fellow Professor John P Burrows, formerly our Director of Biogeochemistry and now with the University of Bremen in Germany, delivers the Vilhelm Bjerknes Medal Lecture on Wednesday. Professor Burrows receives the medal for atmospheric-earth system research. (Bjerknes was a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who made a fundamental contribution to electricity working with Hertz and then moved to wave motions, which are the basis of modern weather prediction).

Congratulations and good luck to all those involved this week!

Further information

Access the full European Geosciences Union 2013 Assembly Programme

Read a news story about Chris Taylor's work showing afternoon rain is more likely over drier soils

Puffin 'wreck' in Scotland

Update #3 1145 28 March 2013

Mark Newell who manages our long term seabird monitoring site (in operation since 1973) on the Isle of May NNR has sent a picture of two puffins washed up on the island. The Isle of May team has found dead adult and immature puffins over the last 24 hours. The SNH Reserve Managers for the Isle of May NNR regularly blog about events on the island. Read their latest words here.

More sad images of the puffin 'wreck' as well as images of puffins on the Isle of May can be found in our recently updated 2013 Puffin 'wreck' flickr set.



Mark Newell /Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
























Update #2 1500, 27 March 2013

This morning (Wednesday 27 March) Prof Mike Harris visited St Cyrus NNR on the East coast of Scotland. The visit, and initial investigations of a number of dead puffins collected over the last two days, has confirmed that the most  likely reason for the ‘wreck’ is the long period of very strong easterly winds making it very hard for the birds to find food. With onshore winds birds that die end up on beaches thus making the numbers involved very obvious.

Prof Harris writes:

“Our first priority has been to age the birds that have died. So far about half the birds examined have been adults and some definitely look as though they would have bred this year if they hadn't died. It is therefore likely that breeding populations are going to be affected in the Spring and Summer. Immature make up the other half of the sample so whilst their deaths will not have an immediate impact on breeding, the wreck is also affecting birds that would have recruited and bred in subsequent years."

He concludes "It is too early to know how many birds are going to be involved but it does look as though there will be both immediate and longer term effects at puffin colonies.”

Puffins on the Isle of May (photo: Akinori Takahashi)

Later this year CEH scientists will be carrying out the latest five year census of puffins on the Isle of May (one of Scotland's most important puffin colonies and the largest in the North Sea). Numbers declined at the last count in 2008.

CEH are working with RSPB Scotland to monitor the situation and learn as much as possible about the cause of the wrecks. Recovery of the birds along our beaches for post-mortem examination is ongoing. You can help by reporting any sightings to us or the RSPB.

According to the RSPB website wrecks have been reported at the following locations:

• Panbride, Angus
• Carnoustie, Angus
• Warkworth, Northumberland
• Balmedie, Aberdeenshire
• Cambois, Northumberland
• Beadnell Beach, Northumberland

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Original posting - 26 March 2013

In the last few hours the CEH Press Office have been receiving reports of a puffin wreck (multiple unusual deaths) on the East Coast of Scotland and the North East England.

Puffins by the Main Light, Isle of May (photo E.Owen)

Professor Mike Harris, a research fellow at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and probably the world's leading expert on Atlantic puffins - he  co-authored, together with Professor Sarah Wanless, the leading publication on the bird ‘The Puffin’ (published in 2011) - says:

“Reports emerged just a few days ago of dead puffins washed up on the beaches of East Scotland and North East England. This is likely to be the biggest 'wreck' since 1947. It comes at an unusual time of year, when the puffins are heading back to land to breed, The  likely cause is the bad weather (particularly the recent run of strong Easterly winds). The birds appear to have died of starvation.”

Later this year CEH scientists will be carrying out the latest five year census of puffins on the Isle of May (one of Scotland's most important puffin colonies and the largest in the North Sea). Numbers declined at the last count in 2008, so this 'wreck' is almost certainly not good news for the long term health of Scotland's puffins.

Contact the CEH Press Office for more information and for interviews with Prof Harris.

Update #1 1555 26 March 2013 - Professor Harris has added some further comments:

"Wrecks of seabirds, when bird die, apparently of starvation after periods of very rough weather, are not that uncommon. However, in the North Sea the species involved are often species such as guillemots and razorbills that winter fairly close to land. Wrecks of puffins are extremely rare, probably because they winter well away from land so that when they die their bodies rarely get washed ashore.

There is currently a major wreck underway which is the largest in the North Sea for at least 60 years.

This was first noticed at the end of last week by people who regularly check the beaches of northeast England for dead birds. Then over the weekend reports started to come in of dead and dying puffins in beaches all the way north to Aberdeenshire.  Most birds were emaciated and had obviously died of starvation. The last week has seen the longest spell of strong to gale easterly winds for many a year and these had undoubtedly caused the birds severe problems and washed ashore allo birds dying offshore.

To date, I have heard of maybe 400 dead puffins and there will undoubtedly be many more, perhaps thousands, and this compares with just a handful over a whole typical winter. This will certainly be the largest wreck of puffins in the North Sea for over 60 years.

Puffins were first recorded back at colonies in early March so many puffins will now be fairly close to the main breeding colonies of the Isle of May, other colonies in the Firth of Forth and the Farne Islands and so at risk of strong onshore winds. We are just starting to do biopsies on some of the dead birds. These confirm that they are grossly under-weight and without any fat. However, many are probably only 1-3 years old, too young to be likely to breed this year since puffins do not become sexually mature until 4-5 and most do not breed until they 6-7 years old. If this first sample is typical, then the breeding population may not suffer.

The puffins at the main colonies in the area – the Farne Islands and the Isle of May National Nature Reserve– are censused every 4-5 years. A whole count of the colony on the Isle of May is to be carried out in late April this year. It may then become clear whether what has happened to numbers since the last count. Hopefully there will be little change!"

Additional information

A follow-up blog post mapping the wreck was published on 12 April: Assessing the 2013 Atlantic Puffin wreck

2012 – a bad year for butterflies?

Butterflies have been making headlines in the UK today, but sadly not for good reasons. New results from the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (UKBMS) were released earlier, and the figures show that in 2012 13 of the UK’s 50+ species of butterfly suffered their worst year on record. Only four species saw their populations increase.

Last year’s relentless rain and cold, previously documented by CEH in our monthly hydrological summaries, created disastrous conditions for many butterfly species as they struggled to find food, shelter and mating opportunities.

Marsh Fritillary - down 71% in 2012 (photo: Tim Melling / Butterfly Conservation)

UKBMS is run by CEH and our partners in the scheme Butterfly Conservation (BC) and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, and has collated records since 1976. The scheme now involves thousands of volunteers collecting data every week throughout the summer from more than 1,000 sites across the UK. CEH and BC are very grateful to all the volunteer recorders for their hard work and tenacity in walking their butterfly transects during 2012.

  

The full table of results (pdf) comparing 2012 to 2011, giving details for 56 butterfly species found in the UK, can be accessed on the UKBMS website. Last year I blogged about how the UKBMS annual figures are used as indicators by Government to monitor long term changes in the UK’s biodiversity (See: Butterflies, biodiversity indicators and long-term change).



More information on the 2012 results can be found on the CEH and Butterfly Conservation websites. If you’d like to know more about the methodology behind the scheme this page on the UKBMS website should help.

Barnaby Smith

INTERACTing at the edge of the world

A guest blog by Dr Andy Sier on CEH's involvement in the EU-funded INTERACT project.

My colleague, Jan Dick, and I have just had the good fortune of travelling to Greenland. This was our first time in the country, and it was a memorable experience. But first, you’re probably wondering "why Greenland?", so let me explain.

We’re involved in a project, funded by the European Union, called INTERACT (short for International Network for Terrestrial Research and Monitoring in the Arctic). This is a network of 33 terrestrial field bases in northern Europe, Russia, USA, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Scotland. INTERACT is designed to build capacity for research and monitoring in the European Arctic and beyond, by increasing  access to these research stations and facilitating cooperation between the project’s partners. INTERACT is actively building a vibrant Arctic environmental research community.

Members of the INTERACT project. 



The UK’s only site in the INTERACT network is in the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland. Long-term environmental monitoring of the site is carried out by CEH and Scottish Natural Heritage as part of the UK Environmental Change Network. It’s also part of the GLORIA programme examining temperature effects on vegetation across alpine Europe. So, there is a history of environmental research in the area. Our site is one of the most southerly in INTERACT, the northernmost site being at 83° N on Ward Hunt Island, Canada. Jan represents the Cairngorms site in INTERACT and we are both involved in the project’s outreach activities.

The Cairngorms ECN site, which is part of the INTERACT network
of Arctic and subarctic research sites.

Each year project members gather for an annual meeting held at one of the research stations. Our hosts this time were the Greenland Institute for Nature Research in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland.

The Greenland Institute for Nature Research, hosts for the
INTERACT meeting.
(Photo by Riku Paavola)

Flying over Greenland for the first time was incredible. My first sight of what is the world’s largest island (at over two million km²) was of spectacular jagged peaks rising up from the surrounding ice and snow. Between these mountains snaked glaciers, deeply scarred by crevasses. Beyond this coastal strip was the Greenland ice cap, a wide plain of featureless ice that is two miles thick in places. The whole scene appeared incredibly beautiful but also fragile; I found myself thinking about the greenhouse gas emissions required to get us to Nuuk, and their effects on this Arctic wilderness.

Mountains in eastern Greenland.
(Photo by Andy Sier)

A glacier in eastern Greenland.
(Photo by Andy Sier)

We touched down at Kangerlussuaq, just north of the Arctic Circle, where the outside temperature was a chilly -29 °C. By comparison, Nuuk, being further to the south and nearer the coast, was a mere -8 °C.



Small iceberg in the waters around Nuuk.
(Photo by Riku Paavola)



Great progress is being made within INTERACT. I think this is largely due to the energy of those involved and the wonderful team spirit. Although I’m a newcomer to the group, I really feel among friends at INTERACT meetings, and we all seem to feed off each other’s enthusiasm. INTERACT can measure its success by the numerous research stations who are now joining as "observer stations". Ten such sites have joined already and more are in the pipeline. They all see the benefits of working together, sharing ideas and learning from other people. To me this is capacity building in action: helping to overcome the challenges of working in extreme environments and creating better facilities for the research that is so vital in this fast-changing region of our planet.

Together with our colleagues Lis and Christer, we presented our outreach work to the team. We’ve been busy on many fronts, including talking to school children and local and indigenous people. While in Nuuk, for example, we discussed hunting and fishing with two residents, a hunter and a government wildlife officer. We’ve also been creating educational hiking routes using the ‘Earthcache’ concept, developing online resources and extending our reach via social media.

A local fisherman and hunter addressed project members
(Photo by Andy Sier)

Greenland encapsulates many of the issues that make projects like INTERACT so essential. Changes are happening fast, with concerns over the fate of the Greenland ice cap and melting sea ice, increasing interest in oil and mineral exploitation, a rising population, impacts on animals and plants and changes to traditional ways of life. It may seem remote, but the Arctic is closer than we think, for its future will affect us all.

The population of Greenland is 56,000 and rising. Nuuk, the capital
is expanding rapidly. There is an acute shortage of housing, so a lot
of new apartment blocks like these are being built.
(Photo by Andy Sier)

Old Nuuk has many wooden buildings.
(Photo by Andy Sier)

Additional information

There is more information about INTERACT on the project website. The Outreach section (developed by Andy) features an image gallery and links to INTERACT’s Arctic Research blogs and Facebook page.

Find out more about the UK’s Environmental Change Network at http://www.ecn.ac.uk/.

Staff page of Dr Andy Sier at CEH

Staff page of Dr Jan Dick at CEH

A window on weather conditions at Wallingford

A 50th anniversary at CEH has passed almost unnoticed. The meteorological station at our Wallingford, Oxfordshire site has now been measuring daily rainfall, sunshine and temperature parameters since 1962 (when the Hydrological Research Unit, which later became the Institute of Hydrology, was established here).

The station is used to monitor local weather conditions on a daily basis and data is submitted regularly to the Met Office. As well as forming part of the UK Climatological Observation Network, records from the site are used to support instrumentation calibration and other scientific projects. Such long-term observations help develop an understanding of hydrometeorological systems and may also show trends over time which could be linked to environmental change.

Near real-time data from the met station from the last six months is now available to view on our website, while full historic data can also be requested. You can also learn more about the type of manual observations which are recorded at the site, and a little bit more about how far back some of the records go, in an information leaflet entitled "Why measure meteorological variables?" [PDF].


A ground level rain gauge in the foreground and a
Stevenson screen in the background at CEH's met station
in Wallingford, Oxfordshire.
Photo: Harry Dixon/Centre for Ecology & Hydrology



References

Rainfall measurement revisited - a paper in Weather by John Rodda and Harry Dixon revisiting work done at Wallingford in the 1960s looking at raingauge design

Weather Monitoring - a paper published in June 2011 in AWE International by Mark Robinson and Geoff Wicks  

CEH's Wallingford Meteorological Station