Thirty conservation volunteers from Yorkshire have spent 500 hours in all weathers during May, June, July, and August monitoring RSPB Bempton Cliffs’ threatened Kittiwake population. Home to the UK’s largest mainland seabird colony, around half a million seabirds make these spectacular East Yorkshire chalk cliffs their home in the summer.

Now on the Red list of highest conservation concern (added in 2021, changing from Amber), the UK’s Kittiwake population has, shockingly, declined by 43% over the last 25 years and the colony at RSPB Bempton Cliffs is one of international significance.

RSPB Bempton Cliffs is a significant part of the Flamborough and Filey Coast Special Protection Area, which holds more than 20% of the UK breeding population of Kittiwakes, so monitoring is crucial to understanding how the population is faring. Each conservation volunteer was given 50 nests to monitor within a specified ‘plot’ and they painstakingly recorded how many eggs were produced and crucially how many chicks fledged from each nest. 865 individual nests were checked weekly across 16 study plots around the Bempton Cliffs, Flamborough and Filey seabird colony.

The Kittiwake study is part of a wider programme of monitoring productivity rates for Gannets, Guillemots, Razorbills, Herring Gulls, Shags and Fulmars, supported by Natural England and the renewable energy company Orsted. Bempton’s Puffins are trickier to monitor, as they nest in burrows in the cliff face, and the Pufflings fledge at night to avoid predators, and so it’s very difficult to know how many of their chicks are fledging.