Welcome to Seabird Soundscapes!

What is it like to be a seabird searching for food at sea?

Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus). Photo: Aline Cerqueira.

Seabirds are remarkable creatures that have adapted to all oceans and climates around the planet. They often spend long periods of time far offshore in the vast oceans and for this reason, there is still quite a lot that we don’t know about what they do at sea.

We know that most of a seabird’s life at sea is focused on obtaining food and that some species forage near fishing vessels, attracted towards fishing baits, fish discards and the lure of an easy meal. This interaction between seabirds and fisheries represents one of the main threats to seabird life all over the globe, resulting in hundreds of thousands of birds killed each year as bycatch in fishing gear.

A group of gannets foraging at sea. Photo: Keith Marshall.

Gannets foraging near a fishing boat. Photo: Wim Klerkx.

Foraging therefore can be a dangerous business for seabirds, and understanding more about their behaviour during this crucial part of their lives can hold the key to create effective ways to protect them where and when needed the most.

How can we find out what seabirds do during foraging?

Because it’s hard to study seabirds at sea, scientists need to develop research methods that enable data collection remotely, while ensuring they don’t interfere with the lives of the animals in the wild. With this in mind, one of the ways to find out what seabirds are up to when far offshore, is to attach miniaturised electronic devices that are capable of recording a range of information regarding where they go, when, how and what they do at sea.

Why use sound recordings?

Sound is an important sensorial component of nature that can tell us a great deal about wildlife. As animals vocalise, eat and move, they leak information about themselves in the environment and thus the sounds they produce can help us learn about the kinds of activities they engage with when out of sight. Sound recordings from animals and their environment can be used as a proxy to characterise activity patterns, social behaviours, ecological processes and environmental events.

Data collection for this research project

During the summer of 2019, researchers collected audio recordings and GPS location data from 10 individuals of Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus) from the third largest gannet colony in the UK, at Grassholm Island, off the Pembrokeshire coast in Wales.

Aerial View of Grassholm Island. Photo: Sarah Money.

Grassholm Island. Photo: Hugh Venables.

Grassholm Island. Photo: Hugh Venables.

Gannet colony at Grassholm Island. Photo: Aline Cerqueira.

Gannet colony at Grassholm Island. Photo: Aline Cerqueira.

Researchers carefully attached miniature loggers to the animals just before they were ready to take off and initiate their trips in search for food at sea. A few days later, when the animals returned to the colony, these loggers were retrieved and data downloaded for analysis.

Seabird Soundscapes researchers, Professor Steve Votier and Aline Cerqueira fitting an AudioMoth acoustic logger onto a gannet at Grassholm. Photo: Hannah Meinertzhagen.

Seabird Soundscapes: an open participatory research project

The Grassholm field expedition generated data containing valuable high-resolution information about seabird activity in the ocean. This is very exciting because these recordings will give us a unique insight into the lives of these animals and everything they’ve been doing, from vocalisations and flights to dives and feeding. We also expect to be able to detect sounds of boat engines in proximity with the animals, and social interactions between individuals of the same and of different species. But in order to unveil marine seabird soundscapes researchers need help!

Sunset at Grassholm Island. Photo: Aline Cerqueira.

Northern Gannet

The Northern Gannet or Gannet is a large, bright white bird with a yellow head and black wingtips. Renowned for very fast dives into the sea when foraging for fish, this species has a very large range and is categorised by IUCN as a species of Least Concern.

Adult gannet. Photo: Tuxyso/ Wikimedia Commons.

Gannet plunge-diving into water. Photo: Mike Pennington.

You can find out more about gannets at the RSPB and Bird Life species factsheets.

Get involved!

To get involved in the Seabird Soundscapes project and start classifying seabird sounds, just click here or go back to the landing page and then click on the CLASSIFY tab. But before getting on with your first audio classification task, citizen-scientists are invited read our TUTORIAL pages to get an overview of tasks and examples of sounds.

You can also follow Seabird Soundscapes on Twitter at @SeabirdSounds and join the project’s Facebook page.