Row over bird deaths at salmon farms
Scotland’s salmon farmers are concealing the scale of trapped birds and deaths and NatureScot, the regulator responsible for oversight, is letting it happen. That’s the message from the Green Britain Foundation – but the salmon industry says GBF founder, energy entrepreneur Dale Vince, is guilty of “double standards” given the number of birds killed by his own wind turbines.
The Foundation used a freedom of information request to obtain information from NatureScot on reported bird deaths at salmon farms over five years.
The data records 532 incidents of trapped wild birds and 129 deaths across Scottish salmon farms including 48 dead common gulls, 36 dead lesser black-backed gulls and 22 dead herring gulls, all Red List species. But these figures are almost certainly a vast underestimate.
Of approximately 207 active Scottish salmon farms, 74 submitted no reports at all. A further 73 claimed to have trapped zero birds. Only 60 sites reported any incidents. Mowi, Scotland’s largest salmon farming operator, had just two sites report any trapped birds in 2025.
The Foundation says, however, that its own monitoring suggests the true figure is much higher and has logged incidents which do not appear in the NatureScot figures. These include:
- Loch a Chairn Bhain: a dead gull and trapped gulls filmed across two separate visits yet nothing reported to NatureScot for either
- Loch Duich: a heron filmed trapped but the farm only reported two gulls that month, no heron
- Kishorn B: birds filmed trapped — the farm’s only submission to NatureScot was a single gull reported the previous year
- Ardmair: a crow filmed trapped — no reports ever submitted to NatureScot
- Bakkafrost submitted wildlife entanglement reports to the salmon industry’s own certification body at two Scottish sites — but filed nothing with NatureScot.
Whistleblowing – or double standards?
Dale Vince OBE, who also founded green energy firm Ecotricity, said: “This is a cover-up plain and simple – by an industry already riddled with poor practice. We can now see it’s not just sea life being harmed by Salmon farming it’s birds too. Workers at these farms are there every single day - they’re legally required to look for trapped and killed birds and report them. They report almost nothing. Yet campaigners who only visit occasionally - keep finding birds that don’t appear in any report. This isn’t incompetence – it’s a cover-up by an industry that won’t tell the truth about the impact of its own operations, and a regulator that’s happy to look the other way."
“NatureScot has spent years developing this monitoring system. The result is an embarrassment to statisticians. It is so riddled with gaps, errors and apparent dishonesty that it tells us almost nothing reliable about what is actually happening to wild birds at Scotland’s salmon farms. For an industry that thrives on exploitation, it should be a source of shame.”
In response, a spokesperson for industry body Salmon Scotland said: “The double standard is glaring. Evidence shows wind turbines like those operated by Dale Vince kill significant numbers of birds, yet there is far less transparency about deaths at individual wind farms or by individual operators.
“Salmon farmers take their environmental responsibilities extremely seriously.
“This is another example of anti-salmon farming campaigners misrepresenting the facts and using selective claims to try to shut down farms that support 11,000 Scottish jobs.
“Information is shared with NatureScot voluntarily or as part of planning conditions. This helps improve monitoring and support investment in technology and infrastructure to reduce the risk of wildlife becoming trapped.”
In the United States alone, The American Bird Conservancy estimates that wind turbines account for around 700,000 to 1 million annual fatalities. This figure is lower, however, than the estimated number of deaths caused by collisions with vehicles and buildings, and domestic cats.
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