Page 38 - BBC Wildlife Volume 36 #10

KITTIWAKES
chips, terrorising promenaders. In fact,
the Tyne kittiwakes behave much as
kittiwakes have always done – the sand-eel
is their food, and their feeding grounds
are the Dogger region of the North Sea
rather than the Biffa wheelie-bin round
the back of the Clayton Street Chippy.
Seasonal visitors
What is also worth remembering is that the
kittiwakes here are a seasonal phenomenon.
“People think they’re here all year round,”
says Derek. “But there’s a good few months
when it’s quiet and peaceful.” Outside the
March–August breeding season this most
pelagic of gulls is once again skimming the
wave-tops of the open ocean.
Many in Newcastle and Gateshead do see
the kittiwakes in a positive light.
“My response to the kittiwakes
is one of awe and unanswered
questions,” enthuses local
naturalist James Common.
“Why are these birds here?
What makes the Tyne suitable
for them? The kittiwakes are a
familiar part of life in the city
and bring a touch of the ‘wild’
into the centre. To me, the
sight, sound and smell of
the colony evokes remote,
inaccessible places, such as
the Farne Islands.”
They’ve found a place
that its their way of
living and they’re
making the best of it.
Can there, realistically, be peace between
urban kittiwakes and the humans who live
among their noisy colonies? Evidence from
elsewhere suggests there can. Photographer
Andrew Mason travelled to the Lofoten
Islands, an archipelago off the Norway coast,
and saw how the lives of kittiwakes there are
enmeshed with those of local people.
“There are urban kittiwake colonies
throughout Lofoten,” he says. “You find
them on buildings in small coastal villages,
as well as on the surrounding cliffs.
The birds are equally happy nesting on
traditional red-and-yellow painted wooden
buildings and the more industrial buildings
in harbours. There are even nests on
windows in the centre of villages.”
Andrew acknowledges that these fishing
villages are a far cry from the newly
gentrified Newcastle-Gateshead quayside –
indeed, he believes that Lofoten’s historic
fishing culture has nourished a better
appreciation of seabirds like the kittiwake.
There are still lessons to be learned
here. “Businesses in north-east England
could start to promote the kittiwakes as an
internationally important breeding colony,”
he suggests. “By engaging people and
helping them to understand how important
the Tyne colony is, this could help to
alleviate the angst.”
Even those who remain hostile towards
the quayside kittiwakes should perhaps
appreciate that decades of colonisation can’t
Kittiwake colonies
have made
themselves at
home amidst
disused buildings
on the Norwegian
archipelago
of Lofoten.
be undone by a snap of the council’s fingers.
“If you were to displace birds off the Tyne
Bridge, say, then that’s more than 1,300
birds that would be looking for a new home
in the city,” says Helen Quayle. “They’re
urban-nesting birds. They’re not suddenly
going to nest on cliffs – this is their home.”
“Developers and building owners are
quick to say: ‘Get it all netted’,” adds Derek
Hilton-Brown. “But they don’t realise that
that’s just displacing the problem. Where do
the birds go? If you’re going to try to move
them to another site, you’d need plenty of
time, several years… it’d be a gradual thing.”
The Tyne kittiwakes aren’t there to cause
trouble, or, for that matter, to draw in
eco-tourists or excite urban birdwatchers.
They’ve found a place that fits their way of
living, and they’re making the best of it,
indifferent, by and large, to the humans
bustling beneath. But it would be a shame
if we were to return their indifference: these
are wonderful birds, delicately built but
fiercely resilient, their colonies as vivid and
full of raucous life as any seaport city.
RICHARD SMYTH writes about
history and wildlife, including this
month’s heatwave news feature on
p60. He also sets the BBC Wildlife crossword.
FIND OUT MORE Natural History Society
of Northumbria: nhsn.ncl.ac.uk/activities/
conservation-research/tyne-kittiwakes
October 2018