The process of surveying the birds on Irish and UK islands is laborious and difficult
Camped alone on Inishvickillane a year or two before Charles Haughey bought that Co Kerry island, I pitched my tent in the lee of a dry stone wall. I knew enough about birds to realise that occasional churring noises coming from the depths of the stones must belong to nesting storm petrels. But, foolishly, it never occurred to me that I might get in their way.
Among the great hosts of seabirds that breed in summer around Ireland’s coasts and on the islands, those coming and going by night to avoid their predators, nesting deep in burrows and stone crevices, present a special challenge to the ecologists who want to count and conserve them. Such surveys were carried out on 180 islands off the UK and Ireland, many of them hard to land on. They did not include, however, for logistical and budgetary reasons, many Irish islands that might have held the birds. Many of them, too – puffins in particular – were nesting on dangerously steep slopes and inaccessible clifftops.
One was High island, off north Connemara, which is currently offered for sale but is part of a Special Protection Area for birds. The Seabird 2000 estimate for storm petrels on the island was 60, but Arneill’s team found almost 4,000 pairs, most nesting not just in the usual burrows, crevices and boulder beaches but in the island’s stretches of tussocky grass. They also found 818 Manx shearwaters, compared with Seabird’s 22. Other islands showed similar patterns.
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