Puffins v guillemots

By favouring a cute and charismatic bird, do we overlook what would be a more rewarding species to spend our time and money on?

Do 'cute' species dominate in terms of funding for research and conservation?

Last year I was lucky enough to host a week of BBC Radio 4’s long-running series Tweet of the Day. Among other things, I talked about ravens, razorbills, guillemots and puffins. It was the puffins that got me into a spot of bother: author Michael Morpurgo took me to task for saying they were “boring”.

Let me explain. Puffins are beautiful and a crucial component of our seabird community, but to a scientist they are less ‘interesting’ than guillemots. Socially, they are pretty dull.

Herein lies the problem. Charismatic animals often win out in terms of funding for research and conservation. We love puffins more than any other British seabird, yet they’re all but useless for telling us about the state of our marine environment.

Are charismatic species more worthy of study and limited conservation resources than the more revealing ‘underdogs’? From guillemots to gulls, here are my four prime examples of birds being unfairly overlooked.

Guillemots vs puffins

If you breed in the darkness of a burrow, as puffins do, it is inevitable that your social life will be more limited than if you breed shoulder-to-shoulder on a cliff ledge, like guillemots. Not only that, guillemot neighbours are often nice to each other, caring for each other’s chicks and working together to keep away predators. All great source material for the ornithologist.

Moreover, puffins are much more difficult to census accurately – which is a pain if, like me, you want to know if their numbers are going up or down. Puffins are tricky to count because they breed underground. Often the best that can be achieved is a count of

individual puffins on the sea, but we have no idea how such figures relate to the true breeding population.

Guillemots, on the other hand, are much easier to monitor, because even though they nest so close together, you can actually see them. What’s more, we know how to convert a guillemot headcount into an estimate of guillemot pairs. During the middle of the breeding season, a hundred guillemots on the cliffs of Skomer Island is equivalent to 67 breeding pairs. It isn’t one-to-one as not all breeding birds are on the cliffs at the same time, and some of those on the cliffs are young birds from previous breeding seasons (guillemots don’t breed until seven years old).

It is because we can assess guillemot numbers more accurately than almost any other UK seabird that we must continue to monitor their numbers – and indeed other aspects of their lives, too. We can study their survival from year to year, their breeding success and the fish they feed to their chicks.

Across much of their geographic range, both guillemots and puffins are declining, probably due to climate change and overfishing. Knowing how much populations have declined is our main ammunition against those threats. Puffins are frustrating because they are so hard to monitor precisely.

I care passionately about protecting all of our seabirds, and have campaigned for the need for high-quality monitoring of both their numbers and survival rates. The uncertainties surrounding puffin numbers make it easier for climatechange deniers and fisheries managers to cast doubt on our data. This isn’t to say we should stop trying to estimate the numbers of puffins (or any other seabird species). But if funds are tight and we want to monitor the state of our seas, then guillemots are a better bet.

Gulls vs albatrosses

One of the most poignant pieces of wildlife art I have ever seen was Gail Dooley’s albatross installation at the Ghosts of Gone Birds exhibition, curated by Ceri Levy and others in London in 2011. I was moved to tears by the 18 sculpted albatross heads, some of which carried the huge hooks from long-line fishing vessels in their beaks.

But as I thought more about it, I realised that had the installation depicted lesser black-backed or herring gulls in a similarly life-threatening situation (and they are

Studies show that magpies are on a par with chimpanzees in terms of their intelligence.

threatened), it would have been much less powerful. Why did I think that?

Of course, we feel albatrosses are magnificent, noble birds. They are Antarctic ‘Methuselahs’, long-lived and the subject of great poetry. Has anyone as eminent as Coleridge written such a powerful poem about gulls? By contrast, we despise our big gulls for a variety of reasons, one being that the UK populations of several (but not all) species exploded in the 1970s, as a result of their less-than-noble exploitation of human waste.

Lesser black-backed and herring gulls steal our seaside fish and chips and wake us up far too early with raucous ‘long-calls’. They make a mess of windowsills, pavements and cars. Every summer there are newspaper articles demanding culls. Yet the British populations of both lesser black-backed and herring gulls are now in decline everywhere except some urban areas. Does anyone care? Has anyone funded any research to understand why?

Magpies vs house sparrows

During the late 1970s and 80s, soon after arriving at the University of Sheffield, I began a decade-long study of magpies. I loved them: they’re easy to observe, supremely intelligent and breathtakingly beautiful. (If they were rare, birdwatchers would be queuing up to see them.) However, as I came to realise, not everyone shared my enthusiasm.

Yes, magpies take songbird eggs and chicks. Yes, their numbers in the UK have increased. But – and this is a big ‘but’ – as we showed unequivocally in a joint research project with the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), magpies are not responsible for the songbird decline. Passerines lay large enough clutches and make enough breeding attempts (in some species, two or three broods a year) that the impact of predation, even where entire clutches are taken, is not a factor that limits population size.

The view that magpies are ‘vermin’ and have caused the widespread fall in British songbird populations is nevertheless hard to dislodge. After I gave a talk to a bird club (that shall remain nameless), and reported our findings, the chairman stood up and said: “Well, you’ve told us a lot about magpies, but…” looking towards the audience as he continued, “...we don’t believe you, do we?” They all agreed.

People interested in rearing and shooting gamebirds, as well as some who think they are protecting songbirds, kill magpies and other corvids in their thousands, perfectly legally. Yet recent scientific studies have shown that magpies and other members of the crow family (together with parrots) are,

in terms of their intelligence, on a par with chimpanzees. There’s a certain irony here, given that chimps are now assigned special protection because of their cognitive abilities.

House sparrows, too, were once considered vermin: guilty of being overly abundant and of exploiting human homes and habitats. They were so despised in the 1800s that they were killed in their tens of thousands, often in shooting matches where trapped birds were released in front of guns. Now Red-listed, with numbers just a fraction of what they were a few decades ago, house sparrows are the darlings of UK conservation, featuring in fund-raising campaigns and citizen science projects. We are encouraged to feed them and to put up ‘sparrow terrace’ nestboxes.

In 2000, The Independent offered £5,000 to anyone who could figure out the cause of the sparrow’s demise. Would anyone offer a reward if magpie numbers started to decline? I doubt it. Magpie studies remain a rarity. To me magpies are as charismatic as sparrows, but beauty’s in the eye of the beholder.

Hihi vs kakapo

Favouring charisma in conservation is not just a British phenomenon. Take New Zealand. Many of New Zealand’s birds are unique, or endemic, to the country and for a variety of reasons lots of them are only a whisker away from extinction. Without doubt the most charismatic of all – and I’m privileged to have seen it up close in the wild – is the kakapo.

In 2009 this large, green, flightless parrot endeared itself to the world when a male named Sirocco attempted to mate with the head of BBC Wildlife columnist Mark Carwardine in an episode of BBC Two’s Last Chance to See. For a while during the 1980s and 90s, New Zealand’s Department of Conservation directed its entire budget to saving the kakapo. This is despite the fact that there were (and still are) numerous other endemic birds, such as the hihi, also at risk of extinction and in need of help.

Although the kakapo is still rare, its population is on the increase, thanks to an injection of funding that supports an intensive-care system to boost breeding. As described in this magazine last year (August), genome sequencing is being used to match pairs that are, genetically speaking, the least related. I’m thrilled by this, but wonder whether the more ordinarylooking hihi, or stitchbird, would have garnered as much support had it been in the same situation.

The hihi resembles a honeyeater, a family of birds found in New Zealand and Australia, but it is so unique it has been given a family of its own. (It is the only bird species where the male and female mate facing each other.) Once the hihi occurred in much of New Zealand’s North Island, as well as on offshore islands, but today its sole original population is on Te Hauturu-o-Toi, or Little Barrier Island. True, the hihi has also been reintroduced to a number of other areas, but the conservation resources devoted to this species are dwarfed by those of the kakapo.

Where next?

To understand how guillemot populations ‘work’, I have monitored the breeding and survival of guillemots on Skomer Island, off Wales, each year since 1972. From the late 1980s, the study was funded by the Countryside Council for Wales (CCW), but in 2013 Natural Resources Wales (NRW) absorbed CCW and funding ended. Had my study been of puffins I have little doubt that the funding would have continued. Charisma counts. As I believe that our longterm guillemot monitoring is essential, I have had to resort to more unorthodox ways of raising money, such as online crowdfunding. Is that the future for conservation?

FIND OUT MORE

Listen again to Tim Birkhead’s Tweet of the Day programmes at bbc.co.uk/radio4/tweetoftheday