Life on the edge

The Kittiwake is a bird in trouble – numbers have fallen and its status is now listed as ‘vulnerable’. And a major effort to count our breeding seabirds is calling on your help…

How you can get involved and help our troubled Kittiwake and other seabirds

The Kittiwake – or Cattwake, or Kittawaax, or Chittywekko, or even Tickle-ass – is the most numerous gull species on earth. With their number reaching around 15 million, they are scattered across the northern hemisphere; from the Atlantic coastline of Nova Scotia to the Arctic islands of the Barents Sea, guano-white sea-cliffs echo to the bird’s unmistakable call: ‘kitti-waa, kitti-waa’. But the bird’s global reach is diminishing. In December 2017, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) upgraded the Kittiwake’s status from ‘Least Concern’ to ‘Vulnerable’. Numbers have plummeted over the last three generations. As so often in bird conservation, the overall picture is complex – but there’s no denying that at some key colonies the Kittiwake population has simply collapsed. “Nesting Kittiwake numbers have plummeted by 87% since 2000 on the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and by 96% at St Kilda,” Birdlife International reports. Cataclysms like this are part of broader decline that has seen the population worldwide fall by some 40% since the 1970s – chiefly as a result of poor breeding success rates. Life in a Kittiwake colony has always been a fearsome challenge. Chicks are reared on precarious cliff ledges amid ferocious competition for space, food and mates. The Kittiwake is not a jack-of-alltrades opportunist, such as the Herring or Black-headed Gull, but it is a survivor; its slight build and mild expression belie a canny capacity for calculating risk and