Norwegians are building boutique hotels for threatened Arctic birds

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Usually, kittiwakes nest in cliffs over the ocean and seldom venture inland. But in the past few years from March to September, that’s changed. Now, due to a warming ocean, increased storminess and other changes that are decimating chick production in their normal habitat, the birds have been setting up house in places such as shopping centers and office buildings in Tromsø and other towns along Norway’s north coast, where they are rankling locals with their noise and mess.

“There's something going on in the bird cliffs that makes them struggle to raise chicks,” says Reiertsen. “The kittiwake cliffs are just being emptied.”

This unusual urban invasion may be a last chance for the region’s kittiwakes, whose numbers along the coast of Norway have plunged by three-quarters since the 1980s, says Tone Kristin Reiertsen, a seabird ecologist with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Tromsø.

Taking a cue from the hotel construction around Tromsø, Reiertsen and a group of colleagues have hatched a plan to help save these iconic Arctic seabirds. They’re building boutique hotels just for kittiwakes, so the birds can raise their families in town without being a nuisance to people.

Reiertsen and colleagues operate Tromsø’s first kittiwake hotel in an abandoned building on the end of a small pier in one of the town’s harbors.

It doesn’t look like much from the outside—a graffiti-covered concrete cube the size of a garage. But there are ledges for nesting, materials for nest-building, and electronic speakers croon kittiwake songs, to lure in honeymooning birds.

"I hope we will find solutions so that kittiwakes and humans can coexist nicely, so we can keep this species in our nature,” Reiertsen says. Otherwise, “the prognosis is very bad."

S: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/norwegians-building-boutique-hotels-threatened-arctic-kittiwakes-gulls/