Terns recovering after fishery closed

Forest and Bird, Volume 23, Issue 1, 1 February 1992, Page 7

Terns recovering after fishery closed

Alan Tennyson

THE FUTURE of the arctic tern, and hundreds of thousands of other seabirds around Scotland, seems considerably brighter after the closure of the sandeel fishery around the Shetland Islands. Each breeding season since 1984, the 2535,000 pairs of arctic terns on the islands have suffered catastrophic breeding failure. In 1980 the Shetlands had more than 40% of the British and Irish arctic tern population. In 1990 only two young were reared. It was feared that many Shetland seabird populations would soon become extinct with the virtual absence of successful breeding, and that the islands’ lucrative $NZ100-million nature-based tourism industry would be jeopardised. However, since the fishery was closed in mid-1990, seabird breeding has recovered spectacularly, with 30,000 tern chicks being raised in 1991. Achieving closure of the fishery for the small eel-like fish, which are the staple diet of many Scottish seabirds, has been a hard-fought battle. Some scientists and fishery representatives argued that there was no link between

the commercial fishery and the huge decline in sandeel stocks (the fishery catches peaked at 52,000 tonnes in 1982 and had plummeted to 4,800 tonnes by 1988). After considerable pressure from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Shetland Bird Club and the Scottish Wildlife Trust, who accused the British government of breaching an international agreement to give adequate protection to arctic tern breeding and feeding areas, the government agreed to take a precautionary approach and close the fishery. And what are commercially caught sandeels used for? They are ground down to feed chickens and pigs, and caged salmon in marine fish farms.