Kittiwake 'hotel' installed on Tyne Bridge

Kittiwake hotels are being installed on the Tyne Bridge as £41-million repair works on the North-East landmark gear up. 

There had been concerns about the future of the colony when plans for the bridge work were announced, but Newcastle City Council has commenced with plans to temporarily re-home the breeding birds. 

Recent closures on the bridge have been undertaken to enable nesting ledges to be installed so that the birds' breeding season is not disrupted during the revamp, planned for later this year. The nesting ledges will be built on scaffold towers which will be easier to reach than other nests during the refurbishment works, the council said.

Some 900 pairs of Kittiwake nest on and around the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle (John Atkinson).

Hotels for Kittiwakes

Councillor Marion Williams, the council's cabinet member for a Connected, Clean City, said: "We're committed to restoring our iconic Tyne Bridge. A constraint we need to work around is the Kittiwake breeding season, so we're installing the hotels ready for when the government releases long-awaited funding and the refurbishment programme can get underway.

"We appreciate this may be disruptive to drivers, but we need to push on with the work to give us a fighting chance of restoring the Tyne Bridge ahead of its centenary in 2028."

An ecological survey conducted in 2022 found there were around 900 active Kittiwake nests on the Tyne Bridge alone. The Baltic Museum came a distant second with around 300 recorded nests.

Iconic Tyneside species

Kittiwakes were first recorded breeding in North Tyneside in 1949, at North Shields. A colony eventually made it inland to the Tyne Bridge in 1962 where birds have remained ever since.