Coquet Island Sponsor a Rosy box Update 3. The 2018 Season

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1 Coquet Island Sponsor a Rosy box Update 3 The 2018 Season Another season has come to an end on Coquet Island and now we can start analysing the numbers. All in all, it s been another successful season with some species having a stand-out year! And it was with real relief that Eider ducks had a return to form after really struggling last season, with many more nesting females and LOADS of ducklings! Three species had record-breaking years on Coquet in 2018 so here goes.black headed Gulls have once again increased in number to a whopping 5564 pairs (70 pairs more than 2017)! Puffins are only counted every five years due to being burrow nesters making it that much more laborious to census an entire population was a census year and the results we re remarkable! For a species which is really struggling elsewhere in the UK, Coquet s population seems to have only gone from strength to strength increasing by around 20,000 AOBs (Apparently Occupied Burrows) since Due to the population being worked out from randomly selected quadrats across the island, (because it is impractical to survey every single burrow for occupancy), there is a fairly large margin for error with this method. But it is a really positive result for our Tommy Noddys (Northumbrian name) and bodes well for the future. The Coquet team carrying out this season s Puffin Census And last but not least, the extensions to the terraces and increased number of nest boxes seemed to pay off for our Roseate Terns as 2018 saw 118 nesting pairs on the island the most ever since Coquet Island became an RSPB reserve in 1970!

2 Breeding Pairs Roseate Tern Breeding Pairs Breeding Pairs 20 0 Year Possibly due to their later arrival on the island or food being less plentiful than last year, there were many more single egg clutches meaning that productivity was lower than last season. However, from a total of 123 chicks, 108 successfully fledged from the island so it was still a really strong year for our young rosys! It was an interesting year for Coquet s other tern species. The total Arctic and Common Tern population remained fairly stable and was a little bit up on 2017 s. However, where Arctics once dominated Commons in number, this year that was flipped on its head with there now being around 400 more Common pairs than Arctics very strange! Sandwich Terns had another successful season and we were treated to large numbers of adults and chicks on the beach for many weeks. This was great news for our ring reading efforts over 800 adult birds had their rings read with almost 200 different birds spotted! And this included the bird in the picture above who was ringed in Denmark! Our cliff-nesting Fulmars and Kittiwakes unfortunately didn t break population records again this year after their highs of However, both species had stable years with populations closer to their average. An interesting piece of work for the Kittiwakes has been to carve nesting ledges into the sandstone cliffs. The area pictured below was carved in the winter of 2017 and as you can see from this year, ledges were immediately taken up by nesting birds. This bodes really well for Coquet s Kittiwake population, another species which is struggling so much elsewhere but certainly

3 seems to be bucking the negative trend on Coquet! And we have more carving planned over the next few months Current Island work Much of the Autumn/Winter work on Coquet revolves around preparing the island for next season. This means large amounts of habitat management, cutting back the large swathes of vegetation we haven t been able to cut whilst the birds have been nesting. As you can see the change is fairly dramatic..

4 Summer (Left) & Autumn (Right) We ve obviously had quite a few extra rosy boxes to clean and treat with wood preserver this season with the new terrace extensions. Our residential volunteers have been invaluable for helping us repair and prepare the 300 boxes for next season and we ve had to find novel new places to store these extra homes for the winter. For a bit of wonderful Coquet Island video footage from our amateur cameraman David Kinchin-Smith, copy this into your browser:

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