The severity of the decline in Arctic skuas has, until now, been very poorly documented. In a new article in the journal Bird Study, this has now been described for what used to be the largest colony of Arctic skuas in Europe: on Slettnes, Norway. In this colony, the number of birds has halved in the last two decades.
The article shows that Arctic skuas in the Slettnes colony face two problems: a shortage of fish in coastal waters and an increase in egg predation by foxes. As a result, the number of young that fledged each year between 2015 and 2019 ranged from very few to none at all. The article in Bird Study is the result of PhD research by our colleague Rob van Bemmelen, conducted at Wageningen Marine Research (WMR).
The information in the article, in particular the population trends and estimation of yearly adult survival, form important input for other studies on population-level effects in the Arctic skua. These data are also being put directly to use in another piece of research being performed by Waardenburg Ecology, where we are calculating the cumulative impact of offshore wind parks on the southern and central North Sea (KEC 4.0, by request of Rijkswaterstaat).
Read Rob van Bemmelen’s PhD research here