Spending a month on St Kilda during the summer, Connie Tremlett and Mark Bolton were tasked by Marine Scotland (funded by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund) to deploy tiny GPS tracking devices on the Leaches Storm Petrel to give information on where the important feeding grounds are, and where the birds might interact with things like light pollution, fishing, and renewable energy developments. This is a species that has suffered a severe decline and is listed as vulnerable to global extinction by the IUCN Red List.
The challenge was not only the tag birds, but to recatch them to get the tags and GPS data back. The team also placed a different kind of tag on 20 birds which will stay on for a whole year, staying with the bird after they have finished breeding on St Kilda and left for the winter. These tags use information on light levels to give a broad picture of where the bird is in the world (to a few hundred kilometres).
They will need to find and recatch these birds again in 2022 to get the data, to give the first picture of where UK Leach’s storm petrels migrate to for the non-breeding period. Currently no one knows.