SAVING BRITAIN'S SEABIRDS: THE CAMPAIGN TO END 'BIRD MURDER' ON THE UK COASTLINE

Today, Britain's seabirds face many threats to their survival.

These include:

* Commercial overfishing
* Rising sea temperatures disrupting their food sources
* Predators plundering the eggs and chicks from their nesting sites
* Disturbance from eco-tourism
* The loss of foraging habitat as the result of the rapidly increasing proliferation of windfarms.

But at least they are no longer - not legally anyway - shot at their nesting sites.

Leaf back to the mid-19th Century when attitudes to birds were very different.

Every spring and summer weekend, parties from the cities would head to seaside cliffs for the purpose of shooting birds, either in order to gather and sell their feathers to the millinery trade or, more likely, just for the ‘fun’ of it.

Inevitably, were this practice to have continued, many seabirds would have faced extinction.

Step forward four determined individuals - Grimsby farmer John Cordeaux, Bridlington clergyman Henry Barnes-Lawrence, Cambridge academic Alfred Newton and Beverley MP Christopher Sykes.

Appalled by the extent of the suffering and slaughter, they resolved not just to highlight what was going on but to persuade the public - and parliament - that what was happening was morally indefensible. 

Their campaign succeeded. 

It resulted - 150 years ago - in the passage through Parliament of the Sea Birds Preservation Act (1869).

It was the first act that sought to protect wild birds in the UK and, as such was to lead, over the years, to even more far-reaching legislation.

* Saving Britain's Birds is available now (price £2) as an ebook on Kindle.