Natural nesting and Kittiwake Hotels

4th April 2025

The sun is strong and the wind is sharp. My car says eight degrees.

Great puffy confetti clouds of cream blackthorn blossom are beginning to dominate the hedgerows. They provide positive outlooks when positive outlooks feel challenged.

By the time Cousin and I get to the beach, the air temperature is seven degrees and the fresh and fuzzy sun is pouring over a high gloss gunmetal sea. It’s an hour and a half before the first fully low tide and small waves ripple like bumps in badly-fitted wallpaper over a hefty strip of glitter that the sun has thrown all the way to the shoreline.

The sharp breeze is from the north north east and when standing up, let alone in the water, the wind is chill. When it comes to wind in this little coastal strip, direction is everything.

Sea water is six point eight degrees and I’m still not swimming. I bore myself with how much I want to swim and how much I miss it. I imagine those that know me will fall slowly onto the shingle with the weight of my laments.

I’m not going to mention it again. I take some pictures, stretch out on the shingle and watch the sea a stones-throw from the swimmers.

I have a premium view of the kittiwakes who this morning are dancing round and round the old rig as if it were a water-grown mulberry bush, dipping and diving and twirling back-and-forth and up and down. They must be fishing but they’re too fast to spot.

The kittiwakes look like gnats swarming on a summer evening. One mass of movement, many parts.

The colony here fills the shelf around the rigs with nests, one family group squeezed in against the next, shreds of nesting material dripping over the edge.

The Lowestoft colony returns to stone window sills on the Catholic church and Marina Theatre and a side ledge of Claremont Pier. Some local businesses have come to welcome kittiwakes, others not so much.

In the natural world, our black-legged kittiwakes would nest on rocky cliffs. Trouble is, with a sandy, shingle coast, there aren’t rocky cliffs in Suffolk.

The colonies, as far as anyone can tell, are happy in their current locations. The birds breed well (female kittiwakes usually lay just one or two eggs) and are monogamous, pairing for life. They live for around twenty years.

However there are now new housing developments specifically designed for kittiwakes. The Kittiwake Hotels are hexagonal offshore structures roughly eight metres tall built on a single leg, designed for up to 500 kittiwakes to nest in. One kittiwake tower is one and a half km off Minsmere, the two others one kilometre off Lowestoft’s South Beach.

The hotels offer small rectangular nesting nooks each of which has a perspex door which will enable the kittiwakes to be observed by people within the tower. Inside each tower is room for two people with desk and chairs and whiteboard. The people can observe the kittiwakes (invisibly to the birds) without the birds knowing and log breeding patterns and colony population trends.

To the casual observer, especially one obsessed with the beauty of the Suffolk coast, the towers look extremely odd. The idea of people lurking inside seems to me odder still.

The Kittiwake Hotels were built by Vattenfall, the company behind the Hornsea Three wind farm site. The company was obliged to build the them because the windmills have the potential to damage kittiwake populations.

Personally, I have reservations. Currently the kittiwakes nest together in communities, not in individual units. As far as I know, they’re private creatures.

In spring, we watch them arrive, build their nests, gather together, head out and back to fish, raise their families, spread the stink of droppings, let their young flock practice swimming and flying before heading off to the mid Atlantic again

We can see the Minsmere tower from where we swim although it’s considerably further out than we are and is frequently hidden in sea mist.

The swimming gang are out of the sea and heading off by the time I’ve finished bird watching.

I walk to the back of the shingle to the sandy, grassy path. A fat herring gull waddles along the path in front of me. It flutters off at the point that I cross paths with Puck and the Boatbuilder leaving the beach.