Wild Gannet Breeding Colony Welfare

Northern gannets breed in large, densely packed colonies on coastal cliffs and offshore stacks. Understanding colony welfare dynamics reveals how social living, disease, and human disturbance affect individual bird wellbeing.

Key Facts

Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth holds the world's largest single gannet colony with approximately 150,000 gannets
Gannets nest in extremely dense colonies where nearest-neighbour distance is precisely the length of two outstretched beaks
Colony attendance and nest building behaviour provides social information and synchronises breeding across the colony
Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI H5N1) caused catastrophic mortality at UK gannet colonies from 2022, killing tens of thousands of birds
Gannets are long-lived (up to 37 years) with long-term pair bonds maintained at the same nest site year after year
Gannet chick development from hatching to fledging takes approximately 90 days, with both parents sharing feeding duties

Welfare Considerations

Gannet colony welfare has been dramatically affected by the arrival of HPAI H5N1 avian influenza in UK seabird populations from 2022 onwards. The mortality events at gannet colonies caused visible mass death of thousands of individually recognisable, long-lived birds that had maintained pair bonds for decades. The disease causes neurological signs including disorientation, inability to fly, and progressive incapacitation before death - welfare harms that are distressing to observe at scale. The welfare of surviving colony members is also affected: HPAI outbreaks during breeding cause nest abandonment as sick adults cannot fulfil incubation and chick-feeding duties. Colony members that witness large numbers of sick and dying neighbours may themselves show stress responses. The ecological scale of the welfare harm - potentially hundreds of thousands of gannets across multiple colonies - represents one of the most significant wildlife welfare events in recent UK history.

What You Can Do

Support Scottish Seabird Centre and RSPB monitoring of gannet colonies for HPAI and plastic pollution
Never handle sick or dead seabirds - contact BDMLR for professional assessment
Report unusually high numbers of dead or sick gannets to RSPB and BTO
Donate to seabird conservation organisations working on HPAI response and monitoring
Maintain responsible distances when visiting gannet viewing sites
Reduce plastic use to lower the accumulating problem of plastic entanglement in nest material