Fulmar Litter Monitoring in the Netherlands – Update 2023

This report adds new data for year 2023 to the previous report (Kühn et al. 2023). A total of 32 fulmar corpses were collected, of which 26 were suitable for monitoring.

Annual numbers of beached birds may vary considerably for unknown reasons. For our monitoring purposes, we do not use birds that have spent more than three days alive under human care in rehabilitation, because particles break and wear down in the muscular stomach and disappear through the intestines (Van Franeker & Law 2015) and are not replaced by new plastics from the marine environment. In 2023, we did receive one fulmar from a rehabilitation centre, which was taken care of for two days, so this bird could be included to the standard monitoring. Occasionally birds from earlier years are added to the current dataset. This does not hamper the data analysis, but slight differences with previous reports may occur.

In 2023, three suitable fulmars from 2021 and two birds from 2022 were added to the dataset. The desired annual sample size is ±40 birds or more (Van Franeker & Meijboom 2002). After a few years with high sample sizes, in 2023 we were able to include 26 suitable birds.