On Ross Sands in Northumberland, a little tern has caught sight of a group of people and is sprinting across the beach. “It wants us to follow it,” says Andrew Craggs, senior manager at Lindisfarne national nature reserve. “It’s a diversionary thing – it’s got a scrape and it wants to take us away because it thinks we’re predators.”
Craggs is no predator, and he’s not after the scrape – a small pit the ground-nesting bird has dug into the sand to lay its eggs. He is a guardian of these little birds, as well as more than 3,500 hectares (8,600 acres) of sand dunes, saltmarsh and mudflats that make up this tranquil nature reserve perched on the tip of England’s north-east coast.
Terns, as well as the ringed plovers that nest on these shores, need protecting. According to the British Trust for Ornithology’s Seabird Monitoring Project, the UK’s little tern breeding abundance – the number of birds returning to breed each year – dropped 19% between 1986 and 2024. Arctic terns were down 25% over the same period, and the number of common terns plummeted 63%. Lindisfarne is important for all three species, which migrate here from across the globe to breed. The little tern spends the winter in west Africa before flying thousands of miles to arrive in the UK in April.
Alongside rising sea levels and coastal flooding caused by the climate crisis, the main threat to these birds is the humans they live alongside. Centuries of development along Britain’s coastline have pushed terns into fewer, larger colonies, which has made them an easier target for predators.
But the biggest problem is harder to spot: disturbance. “Terns are really poor at choosing safe nesting spots,” says Ginny Swaile, Natural England’s deputy director for Northumbria.
“They nest in the most open places, so people can easily and inadvertently run across them.” Scrapes are designed to be camouflaged, she says, but they’re so small they can be hard to see.
To protect the birds, Craggs and his team have erected 3 miles (5km) of short, perforated and electrifiable netted fences, plotted in eight patches across the reserve. While terns and plovers can pop in and out of the enclosures shock-free, it has been set up so no one – and no thing – can get in.
“Wherever the birds land, we’ll put the fence down,” says Craggs. “We’re doing everything we possibly can. We’re not zookeepers – it’s as natural as possible. Most of what we’re doing is mitigating disturbance.”
In a blustering wind on the flawless beach, grey seals start bobbing their heads out of the North Sea to see what is going on. What they can see is a troupe of nature reserve staff and Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England. Why does he think these birds are dealing with more pressure, even in remote habitats such as this?
“Multiple factors,” Juniper says. “Car ownership is now higher. And more interest in outdoor activity. More people coming; more people have got dogs. It adds up to more disturbance. These are very sensitive, vulnerable species.”
The popularity of the site is woven into the birds’ fight for survival. Craggs says up to a million people visit the nature reserve each year, either crossing the tidal causeway to visit Holy Island or to explore the miles of wild and rugged coastline.
Swaile says the fences have been one of the most successful of the shorebird protection measures among a host of initiatives the Lindisfarne team are implementing to sustain populations.
Another is having seasonal wardens that allow visitors “to have a one-to-one engagement with a person who can talk about it and explain the sensitivity of the site”.
The seasonal wardens are the first line of defence on Ross Sands. Visitors to the beach will find someone plonked in a camping chair ready to spring up to tell them all about the protected wildlife in the area.
Wardens will explain to be careful where you tread, take notice of the fenced-off areas and ask for dogs to be kept on leads at all times to avoid a fracas with more delicate animals.
Previously overseen by volunteers, funding from the EU Life fund for protecting the environment has meant the team are able to hire wardens for the breeding season from spring until the end of summer.
Swaile says the wardens are there to educate. “There’s a big gap in people’s understanding of nature,” she says. “The more engagement we do on our reserves, the more we realise people have really lost touch.”
Craggs is excited by this brief. “It’s nature conservation but also an opportunity to educate and get Joe Public enthused, which has been amazing,” he says.
The results have been impressive. In 2020, from the 25 pairs of little terns that arrived on Lindisfarne’s shores, only 15 produced fledglings. In 2025, 138 pairs arrived and produced 201 fledglings – more than a 12-fold increase. “I never thought I’d see that many,” Craggs says.
Juniper talks about how protecting the birds is also good for the economy. “A million people coming in every year,” he says of the visitors, which include birdwatchers. “The tourism input to the north-east would be a multiple of that. You start looking at the national nature reserve as not necessarily a cost – which is a drain on resources – but an investment in sustaining the regional economy.”
On Ross Sands, as the seals swim off and the bird scampers back to its scrape, Craggs is keen to stress how much more there is here than meets the eye. “We don’t just see a beach,” he says. “We see an amazing habitat for a range of different species.”
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