Our Lost Seabirds

Our Lost Seabirds
- there is no time to lose

The UK’s seabirds are struggling and they need our help to survive. BTO’s new campaign – Our Lost Seabirds – aims to turn the tide. With your support, we’re piloting a monitoring training programme to engage and support vital volunteers. They’ll be on the frontline in our efforts to protect 25 seabird species, collecting the evidence we need to take urgent action.

The UK hosts 8 million globally important breeding seabirds and they're all facing increasing pressures from climate change

Since 2001 nesting seabirds in the UK have declined by 30%

Herring Gull populations have declined by 48% since 1986

*The state of the UK’s birds 2020 (Burns et al., 2020)
**Population change estimates in Great Britain and the UK (Woodward et al. 2020)

Thanks to supporters like you, a whole year of recruiting, training and supporting new seabird monitors has been funded. This great work has already started but seabirds need support for more than just one year.

Any additional donations will help support seabird monitors for years to come through continuing training programmes and work making seabird monitoring accessible to all.

Arctic Tern. Edmund Fellowes

A flight to our shores. A fight for survival.

There are eight million internationally important seabirds that breed in the UK. That might sound like a lot, but their numbers are plummeting – in the last 20 years, they’ve faced a shocking 30 percent decline. From puffins and fulmars to razorbills and Manx shearwaters, 25 diverse and daring species flock here every year in search of food and shelter. But they’re faced with so much more. Climate change, overfishing and plastic pollution are threatening habitats and endangering future generations.

Extinction looms on the horizon for a number of species – even the herring gull, that chip-stealing charmer, has seen its population decrease by 72 percent in the last five decades. Now is the time to act, and act fast. We’re poised to launch an exciting new training programme designed to establish and support a land army of seabird monitors. And you can help make it happen.

There is no time to lose

With your vital donations, our seabird monitoring training pilot can become a reality. That means more volunteers from more diverse backgrounds and an accessible and equal programme that’s open to all. With higher volunteer numbers from different areas, we’ll have a broader network that provides a powerful pool of rich data for scientific research and conservation action.

On the horizon

And we won’t stop there. We’re also investing in the education of the next generation of young ecologists, or those who wish to retrain later in life, our seabird champions of the future, and developing a range of innovative digital resources to inspire and motivate hard-to-reach audiences to engage with our work or join our invaluable volunteers.