For the past 52 summers, Tim Birkhead has inched along the vertiginous cliffs to count, ring and observe the guillemots that nest in their thousands on the Welsh island of Skomer.
His life’s work offers unrivalled insight into seabirds in an era of climate breakdown and also reveals the unexpectedly colourful lifestyles of these gregarious birds.
When Birkhead, 73, was first dispatched to the uninhabited island as a young PhD research student in 1972, he was expected to chronicle the decline of the guillemots, whose breeding population had crashed from 100,000 in the 1950s to just 2,000 – largely attributed to oil spills in the region.
So the shape does stop the egg slipping off narrow ledges and, more importantly, this enables guillemots to nest close to one another even on uneven cliff edges.
Observing the colony’s behaviour as it has grown over the decades, Birkhead realised that the birds rely on safety in numbers and nesting crammed together protects their eggs and chicks from predatory gulls.
But Birkhead fears that in the long-term the population will suffer because of such disruption, and it is not yet known how the climate crisis will affect fish stocks in southern British waters.
The original article contains 1,173 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For the past 52 summers, Tim Birkhead has inched along the vertiginous cliffs to count, ring and observe the guillemots that nest in their thousands on the Welsh island of Skomer.
His life’s work offers unrivalled insight into seabirds in an era of climate breakdown and also reveals the unexpectedly colourful lifestyles of these gregarious birds.
When Birkhead, 73, was first dispatched to the uninhabited island as a young PhD research student in 1972, he was expected to chronicle the decline of the guillemots, whose breeding population had crashed from 100,000 in the 1950s to just 2,000 – largely attributed to oil spills in the region.
So the shape does stop the egg slipping off narrow ledges and, more importantly, this enables guillemots to nest close to one another even on uneven cliff edges.
Observing the colony’s behaviour as it has grown over the decades, Birkhead realised that the birds rely on safety in numbers and nesting crammed together protects their eggs and chicks from predatory gulls.
But Birkhead fears that in the long-term the population will suffer because of such disruption, and it is not yet known how the climate crisis will affect fish stocks in southern British waters.
The original article contains 1,173 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!