ISLAND OF BIRDS
Situated less than a mile off the coast of Amble sits Coquet Island. In the 1800s, the island was part of plans for a large extension to the harbour, to create a safe anchorage of national importance. Had it gone ahead, it would have used convict labour to build breakwaters from the mouth of the River Coquet to the island and beyond.
Owned by the Duke of Northumberland, the island has instead become an internationally important bird reserve. Paul Morrison, from the RSPB, manages the site with a team of wardens, who live in the island’s former lighthouse keepers’ cottages.
“I spend some nights on the island, but live on the mainland and commute by boat most days. It’s a delightful, and sometimes exciting, way to get to work,” says Paul. “Over the past few years, we have installed solar power, a desalination plant and wood-burning stoves in each room. It’s a far cry from when I started 37 years ago and lived in a shed.”
Each season, the island is home to more than 70,000 nesting seabirds, including Eider ducks, known locally as Cuddy ducks, after St Cuthbert. Families of Eider ducks are easily spotted from the harbourside at Amble, but puffins are the main draw for visitors. “Coquet is home to 25,000 pairs of puffins, which arrive en masse late March, having spent the winter on the sea,” says Paul. “They settle in their burrows for nesting by mid April. They form large ‘rafts’ of puffins around the island, to the delight of visitors taking pleasure cruises.
“When the island became a bird sanctuary in 1970, there were just a handful of birds, mainly Eider ducks and a few terns, as well as small numbers of puffins, which first discovered Coquet in the 1960s.”
Puffins are delightful and characterful birds, and ‘puffin cruises’ around the island are available from Amble daily during the nesting season, weather permitting. To protect the birds, landing is not allowed on the island. But, while the puffins are the highlights for many visitors, perhaps the most important bird species on the island are the four types of tern, including the UK’s only colony of Roseate terns. In 1984, there were just 18 pairs of Roseate terns left in the UK: under the protection of the RSPB, the number rose to 130 breeding pairs on Coquet in 2020.
Some birds on the island, such as kittiwakes, are doing so well that the team has had to create artificial nest sites for them, as they have used up the natural cliff ledges.
Coquet Island is a success for nature conservation, but there is always more work to do. Each year, the RSPB team builds up the seashell terraces that have been damaged by winter storms, ready for Roseate terns to nest on. And they protect Roseate tern eggs and chicks from predatory gulls, using mobile phones: as soon as they see gulls gathering, the team calls a mobile, which has been rigged to speakers hidden among the nests. The ringtone is a gull distress call, which scares off the predators.