Tim Birkhead has been monitoring guillemots for 42 years – with intriguing results. His surveys, carried out on Skomer island in Wales, have provided key information about the wellbeing of the sea birds’ population around the British Isles and has also produced important insights into the health of our seas.

However, the zoologist’s four-decade-long project is now threatened with closure. The newly formed quango Natural Resources Wales has said it will not continue to fund the £12,000-a-year survey, as part of a cost-cutting exercise. Unless cash can be raised as a matter of urgency, this year’s survey will be the last.

The news has dismayed the 64-year-old professor of zoology at Sheffield University. “This is an incredibly short-sighted decision,” Birkhead said. “We have built an extremely important database of guillemot population parameters and breeding rates, which tells a great deal about variations in numbers of these birds, about the health of their populations and about the health of our seas in general. But that entire database is now under threat merely to save a modest amount of money.”

Among the data gleaned from the Skomer study has been the discovery that guillemots are now breeding, on average, two-and-a-half weeks earlier than they did 42 years ago. “That is a clear signal that climate change is having a direct impact on the behaviour of these sea birds,” added Birkhead.

Birkhead first visited Skomer in 1972 to begin his PhD on the guillemot population there. “It was a ridiculously ambitious task, I realised later. Guillemots do not start breeding until they are seven years old, so you cannot hope to get an accurate picture of their reproductive success until you have amassed many years of data. That is why I decided to maintain the survey every year since then and so have been involved in studying Skomer guillemots for all these decades.”

In the 1930s there were around 100,000 pairs on Skomer. By 1972, when Birkhead first began work there, that had fallen to 2,000 pairs, probably because of oil spills from ships sunk during the second world war. Since then, numbers have rebounded, so that there are now around 25,000 pairs of guillemots on the island.

“Guillemots are doing well there, but they are doing very badly in other parts of Britain. In Shetland they have virtually stopped breeding because their favourite food, the sand eel, is now being fished by humans. We need to keep a very careful eye on the guillemots of Skomer because fluctuations in populations can tell so much about the changes humans are making to the natural world,” said Birkhead.

However, a spokesman for Natural Resources Wales denied that the decision to block funds for the Skomer guillemot project would jeopardise future understanding of the bird’s behaviour. “Public spending is very tight at present and we have to prioritise the projects we support. The decision to cut the funding for this study was taken more than a year ago by our predecessor body, the Countryside Council for Wales,” he said.

“Sheffield University was given plenty of warning that funds would no longer be available for the survey. In any case, we continue to fund important monitoring of birds – including guillemots – on Skomer. Although it is not as detailed as the work by Sheffield University, it provides us with the information we need to properly protect the reserve.”

However, Birkhead said these other surveys had produced misleading results and would not provide the breadth of information that has been generated by the Sheffield study about the population changes in the guillemot.

“These birds are excellent indicators of the health of the ocean,” said Birkhead, who has launched a crowdsourcing appeal to raise money for the project. “I have had a very good response to that appeal, but it is a shame that research of such importance has to be funded in this hand-to-mouth manner.”