Seabird populations in the Shetland Isles have suffered their most disastrous breeding season ever recorded with tens of thousands of young chicks dying from starvation.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds yesterday said that lack of food appeared to be the main cause of the "unprecedented disaster".
Among the worst affected species are Arctic terns, Arctic skuas, puffins, kittiwakes, red-throated divers and great skuas. The vast majority of great skua chicks on the island of Foula, the largest colony in the world, have died, with the remainder in poor health.
Mr Frank Hamilton, director of the RSPB in Scotland, said the situation next year could be even worse. He has called for an urgent meeting with the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries for Scotland.
One theory is that there has been overfishing of sand-eels, a staple diet of most species of seabirds. Sandeels have been fished commercially around Shetland since 1974 and are processed into fish meal and feed pellets for poultry and fish farming. A similar problem affecting puffins and razorbills off the Norwegian coast has been attributed to the fall in sand-eels due to fishing.
Mr Hamilton said that if this was the reason, the RSPB would be calling for a ban on sand-eel fishing in the waters around Shetland. The society and the Nature Conservancy Council have funded research by Glasgow University into the breeding failures of the terns on Shetland.
Mr Peter Ellis, the society's Shetland officer, said: "Failures on this scale have never been witnessed in United Kingdom waters before. This is an unprecedented disaster. Colonies that normally have thousands of chicks hold only a handful."
Eight years ago there were 32,000 pairs of Arctic terns on Shetland, more than 40 per cent of the British and Irish population, but numbers are reckoned to have plummeted by up to 70 per cent.
Total breeding failure has occurred among kittiwakes on the east, south and south west coast of Shetland, and on Foula, where there were 48,000 pairs of puffins last year, breeding failure has also been almost 100 per cent.
Three-quarters of the British population of red-throated divers live on Shetland. This year the number of chicks has fallen by about half. Mr Hamilton said the RSPB had noticed that all was not well in Shetland for the past five years, with many terns either not laying or deserting their nests.
"This year it is much worse, affecting a bigger range of birds. Many adults arrived and did not even attempt to nest. Some laid but deserted their eggs while others deserted their young," he said.
