(20 Jul 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Vardø, Norway – 3 July 2025
1. Mid of puffins
2. Various of cliffs with birds
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Jan Vidar Hansen, fisherman and Seagull Hotel owner:
++SOUNDBITE PARTIALLY COVERED++
“About 70 to 90 percent of the seabirds is gone, during the last 30 years. Lack of food, there’s bird flu, that’s been pretty hard the last three years. It was staying there empty for five days, and I put five nests in from last year in them and they moved in. It’s been there for three years now, the first year there was 55 nests, last year, it was 74, and this year, we have 76. Due to the bird flu probably many of them died, so that’s why there’s many empty nests around the whole city.”
4. Various of seagulls in Jan Vidar Hansen’s seagull hotel
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Vardø, Norway – 2 July 2025
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Maria Skrydstrup, museum educator, Vardø Museum:
++SOUNDBITE PARTIALLY COVERED++
“The seagulls have a very big importance for the locals. Even if it has a lot of seagulls here, different species, they also occupy the town. But they came here from the ’60s and the locals see them as actually come with the spring."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Vardø, Norway – 3 July 2025
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Jan Vidar Hansen, fisherman and Seagull Hotel owner:
++SOUNDBITE PARTIALLY COVERED++
“When you have them on the building you’re living in, it’s a 24/7 noise, so people are suffering about that. And also the smell of it. So, try to build a big hotel (so) that we can get them out of the center, but still be available for the tourists, and yeah, just give them a safe haven to nest.”
7. Various of the seagull hotel
STORYLINE:
For puffins and other birds, the cliffs of Vardø are a haven, but threats lurk around every corner.
Seabirds here are under siege from climate change, predators, local fishing and bird flu.
Local fisherman Jan Vidar Hansen says the wildlife is disappearing.
“About 70 to 90 percent of the seabirds have disappeared during the last 30 years. Lack of food, there’s bird flu, that’s been very hard the last three years," he says.
The population of kittiwakes has decreased by 80% since the 1990s along the Scandinavian country’s coast.
So three years ago, Hansen built a “seagull hotel” out of crates for them and other seabirds to nest in safely.
The hotel has the added bonus of limiting the spread of unwelcome smells, dirty nests and droppings that have become a nuisance for the island’s human population.
"The first year there was 55 nests, last year it was 74, and this year, we have 76. Due to the bird flu probably many of them died, so that’s why there’s many empty nests around the whole city,” says Hansen.
Vidar Hansen’s seagull hotel in Vardø is one of seven such kittiwake hotels along the Norwegian coast.
Seabirds have long been an important part of the identity here — so much so that the local museum has an exhibition dedicated to them.
“The seagulls have a very big importance for the locals. Even if it has a lot of seagulls here, different species, they also occupy the town. But they came here from the ’60s and the locals see them as actually come with the spring. So, it is like when the seagulls are coming, the spring is also near. So, it’s a good feeling,” says Maria Skrydstrup, museum educator, Vardø Museum.
The town is known for its birding tourism as much as its radar station, which provides critical data to the U.S. Strategic Command, thanks to its proximity to Russia.
"So this has become a new industry actually.”
So the loss of birds affects the economy as well as the ecology.
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