Farnes - Balance Right? (1 Viewer)

Took the opportunity of the good weather on Wednesday to get the classic Puffin with Sandeel shot on the Farnes.

I've been visiting for years and I've always felt it must be a balance for the National Trust. By allowing visitors it flies in the face of the Birdwatching Code as the welfare of the birds doesn't come first. If you asked your average Arctic Tern they'd prefer not to waste energy and effort attacking us, and channeling it elsewhere - i.e. catching Sandeels.

However, over the years the NT will have worked out that it's worth it in terms of revenue and it doesn't affect breeding numbers.

Wednesday for me just felt different. The experience was brilliant as always but a couple of things didn't seem right.

Whether it was the lack of a summer and everyone had the same idea, but the number of people on the island was too high. As people waited for boats the path up to the chapel on Inner Farne was completely blocked all the way up for most of the time. The terns on that stretch must have been struggling. There were boats arriving all the time. Back in the day it was Gladtidings. I think we're up to Gladtidings 90 now! This year probably won't be a good breeding season for weather reasons and it just felt like too much pressure on the island to me. I haven't had that feeling previously.

The other gripe was with the boatmen. Throughout the day I witnessed a number of poor customer service experiences with rude behaviour. Yes Ethel has got it wrong and she arrived on one boat and is trying to leave on a different one - deal with it, it's paying your wages! If you didn't organise so many trips it wouldn't happen. Fifty-five on our boat at £30 per head and it's happening all day long - they should be smiling from ear to ear. Stark contrast to the rangers who without exception were all friendly and generally excellent.

Still an amazing place and experience but a situation worth monitoring IMO.

This sort of thing doesn't help.:C:C
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-18539076

We visited on 7th June and were fortunate enough to be able to land on Staple Island in the morning and Inner Farne in the afternoon (two separate trips in our case at £13pp per trip, no landing fees as we are NT members.) I did feel that there were rather a lot of boats to-ing and fro-ing but the NT wardens were superb, especially on Staple. It seemed to be only the Arctic Terns on Inner Farne that were in any way disturbed: all the other birds seemed amazingly tolerant of the visitors and their cameras! I do, however think, that while baseball caps, tweed deerstalkers, rainhoods and straw hats are all perfectly acceptable headwear on Inner Farne that the NT wardens should insist that NO hard safety hats are worn: one chap from our boat wore one and apart from looking very silly, it can't have been good for the attacking terns to come up against such an unyielding target. Would there be a chance of their bills sustaining damage?

Unlike the OP, we had only visited once before, way back in the late 1980's when we had in ignorance and all innocence picked the very weekend that the BBC and Tony Soper were filming and had banished visitors from landing on Staple Island, resulting in us being dumped, without being told before we left Seahouses, on Longstone for a boring and completely wasted hour. Not only were we disappointed, we also felt cheated and it somewhat clouded our view of the boat operators for years afterwards.

At least with Staple only being open in the mornings and Inner Farne in the afternoons, visitor disturbance is restricted to a few hours daily and the NT Wardens/Rangers on Inner Farne were strict about shepherding everyone to the pier at 4:30pm prompt even though the last boats had arrived late (very low tide meant delays returning to Harbour at lunchtime leading to subsequent sailings running late) and visitors thus having considerably less than the advertised hour ashore.

Steve,

An issue well worth raising and, as you say, a situation which needs monitoring.
It's a hellishly difficult judgement which the NT wardens need to make. I just hope no-one decides a rule book is the answer. The people actually there need to make decisions, on a day-to-day basis, concerning how many people to allow onto the islands.
I doubt that there's any robust proof to say that visitors don't affect breeding numbers but, in any case, people will always want to visit areas such as this.
In our current box-ticking world, my main concern would be if some management guru decided there were formulae to which NT staff would have to work, rather than allowing them to consider all circumstances regarding stages of breeding, weather, etc when deciding how many visitors the islands could hold. Let's hope that decisions based on £ signs are never employed!

Peter

Lawts said:

By allowing visitors it flies in the face of the Birdwatching Code as the welfare of the birds doesn't come first. If you asked your average Arctic Tern they'd prefer not to waste energy and effort attacking us, and channeling it elsewhere - i.e. catching Sandeels.

Click to expand...

To just expand on the subject of terns nesting close to people, in the late 1980s, I worked at RAF Kinloss, where in the fenced-off secure weapons storage area (in RAF teminology, 'bomb dump'), we had a large mixed colony of Common and Arctic Terns. People walking on the roadways and paths in the bomb dumb could walk past birds nesting on the grass within a metre of them, and the birds seemed not in the least disturbed. However, if anyone had to walk off the path for any reason, up the birds went in a cacophony of alarm calls! On changeover of an incubating pair, the returning birds would fly calmly across you, close enough for you to hear the hiss of air over the feathers - magical - and seemed to judge that we presented no threat. The mesh fences prevented cats from being a threat; those birds on sentry-go atop the fence would raise the alarm on seeing a cat, but the intensity of the calling was fairly low; the sentry birds seemed to recognise that the fence was a barrier.

It's possible that the Farne tern colony functions in a similar way, but of course the path 'boundaries' are not 3-metre mesh fences.
MJB

I visited Inner Farne at the end of May this year and I asked one of the wardens about disturbance to the breeding Arctic Terns by the hordes of people walking around. He told me that it was probably the lesser of two evils, if the people weren't around the Gulls would be in like a shot to predate the eggs and chicks.

It is a contentious issue, and one of my pro-photographer clients felt uneasy about the level of disturbance after our trip to Inner Farne a couple of weeks ago. Without income from visitors to the islands, NT wouldn't be able to employ the team of rangers to carry out habitat management etc. It's hard to see how there could be any practical method of restricting visitor numbers as that would impact on the boat operators and the local economy. There are a lot of issues that have to be balanced, and it wouldn't go down well to leave boat companies with spare capacity in businesses that they've built up on the success of running trips to the islands...

What has been shown is that the terns close to the path have a longer incubation period (regular slight cooling of eggs) but a higher productivity (predatory gulls associate the boardwalk with human activity). Swings and roundabouts.

cheers
martin