CRUCIAL BIRDS STUDY APPEAL
Unique 45-year project under threat unless funding found
FOR MORE than 40 years, Yorkshireman Tim Birkhead has been engaged in an extraordinary piece of research which has seen him making annual trips to a remote Welsh island to chart the story of a bird population that was decimated during the Second World War and is now threatened by the effects of climate change. But as the award-winning zoology professor prepares for retirement next year, he is now hoping to find the funding to allow the project to continue for decades to come.
“Basically, I’m looking for a millionaire who wants to invest in conservation,” he says with a chuckle. Professor Birkhead, who grew up near Leeds and has worked for the University of Sheffield since 1976 in its Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, first visited Skomer Island off the coast of Pembrokshire in 1972 as part of his PhD project at Oxford. He went there to study and research its guillemot population, which at that stage numbered just 2,000 birds, to see what measures could be taken to improve the situation.
“They had been having a really hard time and numbers were plummeting. The truth was that in three years, you hadn’t a hope in hell of solving the problem. But you had to start somewhere. I decided after the second year I would probably keep this going.”
His pioneering research involved examining the survival rates of eggs and chicks, partly by marking birds with coloured rings to see which were surviving year by year. After becoming a lecturer himself in Sheffield, Professor Birkhead asked a promising PhD student to repeat his study “while avoiding the mistakes I made” and the project began to take on a life of its own once again. The most recent study found guillemot numbers have recovered to around 25,000 on the island.
But it was only in recent years that he made an important breakthrough in what had happened to the species by looking back at what the guillemot population on the island was in the 1930s. “What that research suggested was that before World War II, there might have been up to 100,000 pairs of guillemots on the island. The drop since then was almost certainly caused by oil pollution during the war. The increases we have started to see could simply be a slow recovery from that massive drop.”
While guillemots appear to be prospering on Skomer, Birkhead says that is far from the case elsewhere. “Skomer is almost unique in having one of the very few populations of guillemots that are increasing. In other places, most certainly in northern Scotland, their numbers are in freefall. The explanation is almost certainly over-fishing linked with climate change.”
Birkhead says he believes it is vital the study on Skomer continues to better understand how guillemots and sea-birds more generally are coping with the impacts of climate change. In February 2014, a massive “seabird wreck”, the result of persistent storms killed around 50,000 seabirds, many of which were guillemots from Skomer. He says this long-running nature of the study means it is in a unique position to understand the ongoing consequences of climate change on bird populations.
“We know that these storms, like the ones that are happening in the Caribbean at the moment, are exacerbated and made more intense by global warming and climate change. There is an increasing risk to sea-birds, even in this country.”
Birkhead, aged 67, says he hopes to raise around £100,000 by the time he retires in December 2018 to secure the long-term future of the project. And while the aim might seem ambitious, in 2014 he managed to raise £50,000 in just two weeks to keep it running up until 2018.
For around 20 years, the research project was funded by the Countryside Council for Wales but the funding was stopped in 2013 as the body’s activities became the responsibility of Natural Resources Wales. He set up a crowdfunding page in an attempt to keep the study going and was amazed by the response as the money poured in for the appeal.
“We raised enough money for five years but that is coming to an end next year. The original JustGiving site asked for £14,000, which would have been one year’s research money. But in fact, we raised about £50,000 in two weeks and it was the most phenomenal two weeks of my life. One of the things that was just extremely gratifying was people donating could leave a message and there were wonderful messages of support. Governments might not give a monkey’s about conservation but the public do.”
He says fundraising efforts will soon start again to secure the project’s longterm future. “We would like £100,000 in the kitty so when I retire in 2018, I have a pot to hand over to keep it going for another 40 years.”
His academic career has been about much more than just the Skomer project and Birkhead was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy last month. He says a personal highlight of his career was being elected to the Royal Society in 2004 for his work on reproduction. “It is the ultimate accolade you can get short of winning a Nobel Prize. I felt extremely lucky.”
Professor Birkhead started producing short videos to help give his
students a more innovative learning experience in the 1980s – something that was considered pioneering at the time. He says a few colleagues were “gobsmacked” at the idea but his students were very positive. “Students always like somebody who is enthusiastic, who is prepared to go the extra mile for them and is prepared to do something different. But the word that sums up teaching for me is empathy. It is about understanding not everybody progresses at the same rate and some people find certain things difficult.”
Professor Birkhead is also a celebrated author and his latest book The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and
Outside) a Bird’s Egg was shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2016.
Since the early 1980s, he has been the curator of a zoology museum at the University of Sheffield and in recent years, the facility has been opened up to the public through monthly tours. It is all part of his mission to inspire the public about science and in the past decade, he has given public lectures on different topics every three weeks.
“A lot of people think people in universities have an easy life. That’s twaddle – we work our socks off but if you love what you do, it is fine.
“The best part of my job is working with young scientists who clearly have a passion for zoology and are so enthusiastic to learn more about the animals and plants that share our planet. Science is such an important subject and as academics, researchers and teachers we have a responsibility to ignite that passion to learn about our world and how we can help to protect it for future generations.”
Basically, I’m looking for a millionaire who wants to invest in conservation. There is an increasing risk to seabirds, even in this country, from climate change. That is why this project is so important. Tim Birkhead, zoology professor