Biosecurity for Wales

The legacy of Biosecurity for LIFE is a measurable improvement in biosecurity practice across all 42 UK Special Protection Areas (SPAs) designated for breeding seabirds. These globally significant seabird populations are now better protected against the threat of invasive mammalian predators, such as rats and mink, but we cannot be complacent.

Biosecurity for Wales continues working to implement and improve long-term biosecurity practice across all Welsh islands that are SPAs and expands to include Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) designated for breeding seabirds. The 13 islands included in our project are havens for seabirds thanks to the natural absence of mammalian predators such as rats.

Seabirds are perfectly adapted to a life at sea but are vulnerable on land. Puffins, Manx Shearwaters and Storm Petrel use burrows and crevices to keep their eggs and chicks safe from their natural island predators, such as large gulls and skuas. Rats, however, are not a natural predator for seabirds. Assisted by the global shipping industry, rats only arrived in the UK within the last 300 years, they can easily access burrows and crevices to take eggs and chicks. One pregnant female rat can produce a colony of over 300 in just 8 months, rats are adaptable, omnivorous, and able to thrive in almost any environment. With no competition or predators on these islands and a huge amount of food available during the seabirds breeding season, rat populations can explode.

In contrast, seabirds are long lived and breed slowly – most laying just one egg a year, meaning populations are slow to recover from declines. Because they are so long lived – the oldest recorded Manx Shearwater is 50 years, 11 months, 21 days - it can be hard to notice that populations are declining because adults will keep returning to nesting sites despite not fledging any chicks. Declines only become obvious when older birds die off and no new adults return to start breeding. Puffins, Manx Shearwaters and Storm Petrels are generally monogamous and site faithful, returning every year to the same partner in the same burrow, meaning they are unlikely to react quickly to the presence of rats.

When these predators are introduced to seabird islands they devastate island seabird colonies, unfortunately they are known to reach new islands regularly. Over 40 biosecurity incursions were reported on islands designated as Special Protection Areas (SPA) for breeding seabirds around the UK since 2018 alone, ranging from shipwrecks and cargo spills to invasive predators found on island or jumping ashore from vessels.

Seabirds in Wales

Over half the world’s population of Manx Shearwater nest underground in burrows on just a handful of Welsh islands, with over 350,000 pairs on Skomer alone. The third largest Gannetry in the world can be found off the Pembrokeshire coast on Grassholm, the population of Atlantic puffin, a species threatened with global extinction has increased in size in Wales over recent years and we also host important numbers of Artic Tern, Herring Gull and Cormorant to name a few.

Wales’ responsibility for the fate of UK seabirds has never been greater, while many seabird populations around the world have been declining, some seabird species in Wales have maintained or even increased their populations.

If an invasive predator does reach a seabird island, we need to know about it quickly. We continue to establish routine surveillance on islands to help with detection. Using harmless, non-toxic tools such as camera traps, footprint tracking cards and wax chew blocks. Alongside these passive surveillance methods, our amazing conservation detection dog, Jinx and his handler Greg can actively search islands as well as boats and high-risk cargo (such as building materials) heading over to the islands. Jinx is trained exactly as bomb or drug sniffer dogs, but on the scent of rats. If he smells a rat or rat droppings, he sits to indicate to Greg that he has found something, Greg will then call him back and go for a closer look himself to identify what Jinx has found. Jinx does not chase or catch rats. Having an active detection tool in our toolkit allows us to cover more ground and have more confidence in our results – a real game changer!

Jinx was trained as part of Biosecurity for LIFE, he was the first conservation detection dog trained to support biosecurity on the UK’s seabird islands by searching for rats and is now an integral part of Biosecurity for Wales. Dogs have 300million scent receptors compared to our 6million and are able to pick out the scent of rat amongst all of the other smells on islands and boats.