When puffin numbers on the small island of Craigleith in the Firth of Forth, declined steeply from 5,000 pairs to less than 1,000 in the late 1990’s the Scottish Seabird Centre knew they had to take action. The SOS Puffin Project was launched to stop the main threat, the invasive spread of a non-native plant, the tree mallow, as its rapid growth was choking access to puffin burrows and preventing them from successfully rearing their young.
The project’s cry for help has been answered over the 18 years by thousands of volunteers and SMEEF has been helping fund ongoing conservation and research work to help these charismatic birds thrive. The committed, volunteer workforce have been coming back year after year to cut down the tree mallow and count the occupied puffin burrows. But safe access to the island isn’t easy, boats and life jackets need to be maintained and staff need to lead the teams.
Scientific monitoring and studies from the Seabird Centre team and the SRUC have resulted in key findings, suggesting that burrowing actions resulting in bare earth encourages the mallow seed to germinate. Important vegetation monitoring is ongoing, using both drone imagery and field mapping to create accurate vegetation maps of the island, while small scale nettle control measures have been trialled. All this hard work has paid off with mallow coverage down from 80% to 6%, natural vegetation is recovering and the 2024 puffin counts have estimated 5000 breeding pairs again.
In 2023 SMEEF was able to provide a grant of £20,923 to support this work using resources donated by businesses to SMEEF.