Looking out for seabirds off Tenby

To Tenby, where the weather was glorious last week and where I was very keen to go on one of the various boat trips. You can go on one to Caldey Island, which is just over half a mile south of the mainland and which is home to a monastic community (thus making it one of Britain’s holy islands, for there has been a monastery there since the sixth century; admittedly it was closed down during the Dissolution, but an abbey on the island was rebuilt in 1910, originally for Anglican Benedictines although it’s now occupied by Cistercians). You can go mackerel-fishing or seal-watching. Or you can go on an island cruise which lasts for about an hour and doesn’t land at Caldey, although it does take you to see the bird sanctuary on the smaller, neighbouring St Margaret’s Island which has no public access.

I chose the latter as I was very keen to see the seabirds; the Puffins especially appealed, mainly because I think they’re fascinating birds but also because there was a big feature on them in the most recent issue of the RSPB members’ magazine Nature’s Home. Also, it has to be said, Allison had seen loads of them on a boat trip when she went to Newfoundland recently and yes, I was feeling a little bit jealous about that (what we in Britain know of as a Puffin – which, as it happens, is the provincial bird of Newfoundland & Labrador – is known internationally as the Atlantic Puffin, for there are two other species of this diminutive yet very distinctive seabird that can be found in the northern Pacific Ocean).

I bought my ticket from one of the wooden booths by the Harbour that sells the tickets for the variety of boat trips on offer. I was advised that, as the tide was low, the trip would be setting off not from the Harbour but from the nearby Castle Beach which has a mobile jetty which is used by the various boat trip operators at low tide, and which is manoeuvred into position by a tractor. The boat was due to sail from there at 3:30pm but the booth-lady reckoned I should be there ten minutes beforehand. Castle Beach is one of the four golden-coloured beaches that adorn Tenby and which are key to this walled Pembrokeshire town being a very popular holiday destination. There’s a tidal island there, St Catherine’s, which you can walk out to at low tide although it’s closed to the public. On it is a fort, one of the Palmerston Follies that were built in the 1860s when there was a war threat with the French; never used for its intended purpose, it has at various times been a private house and even a zoo. Nowadays it is apparently open to the public on a very occasional basis (according to a series of posters that can be seen on the walls of several of the town’s hotels and B&Bs) and two years ago it appeared on TV as the high-security ‘Sherrinford’ prison in Sherlock. But I digress.

Anyway, at the appointed hour of 3:20pm I and a couple-of-dozen others who’d paid their £14 were there on the beach, forming a reasonably orderly queue by the tractor amid the holiday-makers who were simply there to catch the sun and occasionally go and cool off in the sea, and very nice weather it was for that. Come 3:35 I was wondering if our boat was going to actually show up, for the only vessels that had come along to the jetty had done so to unload passengers and none of them even remotely resembled the yellow catamaran that had adorned the Tenby Boat Trips board that I’d seen when I’d bought my ticket. Then, said yellow catamaran (“designed especially to cruise the beautiful coastal water around Tenby … unique shape makes for a very comfortable, stable ride”) hove into view and we passengers dutifully trooped on board.

After the safety announcements we were off, heading out into Carmarthen Bay. While we weren’t going to be landing at Caldey Island, we did go past the jetty on our way to St Margaret’s Island, which is where the main seabird colony is located. Although it’s uninhabited by people now, St Margaret’s Island bears the evidence of human activity in the form of some disused housing for workers who quarried limestone on the island until 1851. Nowadays it’s a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) as well as being a part of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park (as is Tenby, for that matter). 

As we approached it, we saw plenty of gulls (three types of those – Herring, Lesser Black-backed and Greater Black-backed) circling and calling ahead, quite a few Cormorants and some low-flying birds, dark on top and white underneath, which it took me a minute or so to realise were either Guillemots or Razorbills, depending on what their beaks looked like!

The boat hove to underneath the cliffs so we could all get a good view of the birds. Atop the cliffs were the Cormorants, St Margaret’s being home to one of the largest Cormorant nesting-sites in England and Wales. Below them, perches on the ledges on the cliff-face, were the Guillemots and Razorbills – both members of the auk family and thus related to the Puffins although they are larger; the Guillemots are the largest with their slender heads and pointed beaks, whereas the Razorbills (black rather than brown) are more stocky-looking with thick, blunt beaks that have a white line on them. They and the Puffins have similar lifestyles – they spend much of their time at sea and only come to land in order to nest.

Alas, despite much looking with the binoculars I didn’t see any Puffins (I’m reminded of an old postcard which has a drawing of a Puffin on top of a cliff next to a drawing of the same cliff-top without the Puffin, captioned ‘nuffin’). They nest at the top of the cliffs in burrows, and their numbers at St Margaret’s are much smaller than those of the other birds (no more than a couple-of-dozen nesting pairs) because of the rats. St Margaret’s can be accessed from Caldey at low tide, and the rats on Caldey make their way across and eat Puffin eggs and chicks. Apparently there are plans afoot for dealing with Caldey’s rats, which is good news for the Puffins’ future.

And they need some good news. At the moment, their numbers are in decline in Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes and Norway as well as the British Isles. They are currently designated as ‘vulnerable’ by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) while my RSPB field guide has them as an amber species. Getting rid of the rats on Caldey Island to help the Puffins on St Margaret’s may be a small step but it’s a step in the right direction; they managed it on Lundy Island, which is some thirty-odd miles due south of Caldey.

As well as two out of the three possible auk sightings, there were plenty of gulls. As well as the usual species – Herring, Lesser Black-backed, Greater Black-backed – I was delighted with a much rarer sighting, that of a Kittiwake. Much more of a marine bird, this one is hardly ever seen on land except when it’s nesting. When did I last see one of those? To be honest, I’m not sure if I ever have for most of my seabird-watching is done from the land. I really should do these boat trips more often! Down by the sea, a small Cormorant turned out to be a Shag (cue the jokes; sometimes bird names do birdwatchers no favours!).

Cruising along by Caldey, after seeing plenty of Cormorants fishing out at sea, we stopped by a rocky outcrop which is home to a Herring Gull colony, where we were able to see the chicks, almost but not quite ready to start flying, wandering around. Oystercatchers also abounded, but in between them I noticed a small brown bird, similar-looking to a thrush but smaller, which I was happy to identify as a Rock Pipit (“breeds along the rocky shorelines and on small islands around the coasts of Britain and Ireland … avoids sandy beaches … rare inland”). I saw a couple more before we moved on.

It’s possible to see seals in the sea off Tenby, but today wasn’t our day for that. We did see a few jellyfish towards the surface, though; later, while walking along the beach, I saw one that had quite literally been left high and dry by the tide. As the boat made its way back to Castle Beach and the old fort on St Catherine’s (home to quite a few Jackdaws if nothing else), I scanned the surrounding area with my binoculars once more, and was rewarded for my efforts with the sight of a Gannet diving head-first into the sea.

Even though I didn’t get to see any Puffins, I found the trip to be most enjoyable and was able to add a fair few species to my ‘seen in 2018’ list.