Local ornithologist, Andy Rickeard, shares how support from NHSN’s Dickinson Memorial Fund has helped Kittiwake research in Gateshead
The Kittiwake population nesting along the River Tyne has been studied for many years. Kittiwakes first colonised buildings along the river in the 1950s, at North Shields, before spreading along the Tyne and reaching Gateshead in 1965. One of the buildings they colonised was the Baltic Flour Mill and at its peak there were 300 nesting pairs on the ledges of that building.
When the flour mill was converted into an arts centre in the mid-1990s, the Kittiwake ledges were covered during the renovation process. Mitigation was provided in the form of an artificial nesting tower in the centre’s car park. The tower is a converted communications mast with three marine ply faces in a triangular pattern lined with ledges to nest on. A small number of breeding pairs moved on to the tower whilst others relocated to other buildings along the Tyne.
The colony at the tower continued to develop and when the tower was moved 2km downstream to Gateshead Saltmeadows, the birds followed. Today there are regularly over 100 breeding pairs on the tower in any season.
Northumbria Ringing Group have studied the Kittiwakes at the Saltmeadows by ringing the birds since 2003. Breeding adults have strong site fidelity and ringing has confirmed that they return to the tower each year and, in the majority of cases, to the same face and ledge of the tower each time.
Although some birds ringed as chicks later return to the tower to breed, the majority disperse to breed elsewhere and ringing has shown that Gateshead chicks have gone on to breed along the East Coast at Hartlepool and Lowestoft as well as Northern France with eight birds breeding at Pas de Calais, Boulogne and Cap Blanc Nez.
Ringing and resighting at breeding colonies is an effective way to determine the dispersal of young birds, but finding out where birds go outside the breeding season is more difficult. Before the 2023 breeding season, a donation of tiny electronic tracking loggers (geolocators) gave an opportunity to reveal the movements of adult Tyne Kittiwakes from one breeding season to the next. That summer, 18 adult Kittiwakes breeding on the Saltmeadows tower were given colour rings with geolocators attached.
The geolocators are powered by tiny hearing-aid batteries and collect data for daylight hours and sea surface temperature. From daylength and the times of dawn and dusk it’s possible to calculate the position of the bird to around 50 km. To obtain the data geolocators need to be retrieved the following year.
Ringing Kittiwakes on the 30 ft high tower requires access using a cherry-picker, kindly facilitated by Gateshead Council each year, but with the value of potentially recovering geolocators we wanted to maximise our chances and planned two sessions with a cherry picker in summer 2024.
We were delighted to be successful in an application for a grant from the Dickinson Memorial Fund, through the Natural History Society of Northumbria which, along with a donation from Shoney Wind Ltd, secured an extra day with the cherry-picker.
Before the ringing days, the locations of returning birds with geolocators were recorded as part of the annual monitoring during the breeding season. 13/18 birds with Geolocators were seen to have returned, with most of them apparently breeding.
In 2024, four geolocators were recovered, and the data are currently being analysed, but initial results show that all four left Tyneside after breeding, travelled north past Orkney and the Hebrides and towards Greenland. Some travelled as far as the coast of Newfoundland before moving further south in the North Atlantic and eventually returned back to Tyneside, in some cases via the coast of Northern France.
* Plot of Winter migration for Kittiwake ANR (Chris Redfern) – Location points for Kittiwake ANR are coloured by date, starting with green from July 2023 and changing gradually through to yellow, then orange and finally to red as ANR arrived back to the colony the following spring (March to May). The points are plotted onto a bathymetric map of the North Atlantic where the shade of grey indicates ocean depth, darkest grey being depths greater than 5000 m.
What next?
It’s hoped that further geolocators will be recovered in future years, as although the battery will eventually fail the data should be retained and be recoverable.
Kittiwakery is a pilot Kittiwake nesting structure installed in February 2023 at H Nichol’s yard, adjacent to the Saltmeadows tower. Kittiwakery is funded by the Dogger Bank South offshore wind farms and managed by Shoney Wind. In 2023, birds were seen to land on the tower, and take material from dummy nests. In 2024, birds were seen bringing new nest material to the Kittiwakery, defending nest locations and copulating. Although there was no successful breeding in 2024, it’s hoped that in 2025 and beyond the Kittiwakery will allow the further expansion of the colony and further study of this iconic species on the Tyne.
We thank Ewan Wakefield of Durham University for the donation of geolocators that he was unable to use for his ongoing projects.