Netherlands puzzles over death of estimated 20,000 guillemots
Source: The Guardian
Netherlands puzzles over death of estimated 20,000 guillemots
Scientists yet to figure out how the birds died after hundreds wash up on Dutch coast
Daniel Boffey in Brussels
Wed 6 Feb 2019 10.57 GMT
Scientists are scrambling to understand the sudden death of an estimated 20,000 guillemots off the Dutch coast, hundreds of which are washing up on the country’s shoreline.
The bodies of the birds, which spend most of their lives at sea where they dive for their food, started emerging over the past month, from the Wadden Islands in the north to Zeeland in the south.
Mardik Leopold, a biologist from Wageningen University, said the Netherlands “had not seen such mass deaths since the 1980s and 1990s”, describing it as “rather a major incident”. Hundreds more sickly birds have been taken into sanctuaries for treatment.
“The working hypothesis is that it is a combination of bad weather plus something else, and we are trying to find the smoking gun,” Leopold said. “We have dissected some of the birds. They are clean but they were very skinny, with gut problems, which is indicative of starvation. But we need a larger sample and so have been asking people to collect birds for us.”
One possible cause of the seabird wreck – the technical term for such sudden unexplained mass deaths – is the contents of 291 containers lost from a large container ship during a storm on the night of 2 January, north of Ameland, an island north of Amsterdam.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/06/netherlands-guillemots-death
The dead guillemots have been washing up along 300km of Dutch coastline
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