Donations of £10 or more received before Sunday 29 January will be entered into a draw to win a pair of binoculars donated by Zeiss.
Two birders are walking 61 miles in two days to raise money for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) Avian Influenza appeal. Nick Moran and Jonny Rankin will walk from BTO headquarters in Thetford to Scolt Head Island on the north Norfolk coast, where hundreds or perhaps thousands of birds are thought to have been wiped out last year. Avian Influenza (or ‘bird flu’) has struck 61 species in the UK since the outbreak began in 2021, with particularly high levels of mortality recorded at seabird colonies last spring.
Nick and Jonny have previously raised more than £20,000 to help fund work to protect the Turtle Dove, the UK’s fastest declining bird. When they’re not on a sponsored walk, run, bike ride or kayak trip, the two are regular visitors to Scolt Head, an important breeding site for several species of tern. Sadly, more than three quarters of last year’s chicks were killed by bird flu, with bag after bag of corpses removed by the island’s warden. Their sponsored walk – titled ‘Tern the Tide’ – hopes to do just that: to change the fortunes of Norfolk’s internationally important but increasingly threatened seabirds.
Common Tern, copyright Glyn Sellors, from the surfbirds galleries
BTO Director of Science Professor James Pearce-Higgins explained the situation to parliament’s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs committee in December. He compared the speed and scale of bird flu’s impact on breeding seabirds in 2022 to the way pesticide use in the 1950s pushed some UK raptors close to extinction, and the devastating effect on farmland birds of agricultural intensification in the 1970s and 1980s.
While data from bird ringing and other BTO-led long-term monitoring schemes have helped scientists to establish the scale of the outbreak, the true impact of bird flu remains unknown. Only by surveying seabird colonies later this year, once the remaining birds have returned to breed, will the true scale of loss for those species be known. For other types of bird, the story may just be beginning.
Nick Moran, BTO Training Manager, said: ‘It’s been harrowing to see large numbers of dead birds, particularly seabirds and wildfowl, during the past year. The scale of the impact on the tern colony on Scolt Head Island – a place close to my heart – convinced us to take action, and we’re hoping that our 61 mile walk will help tern the tide on this dreadful disease.’
Donations of £10 or more received before Sunday 29 January will be entered into a draw to win a pair of Terra ED binoculars donated by Zeiss.
Head towww.justgiving.com/page/ternthetide to sponsor Nick and Jonny and find out more about their challenge.