When the wind gusts towards you, you can savour the fishy aroma of a seabird colony: rich and repugnant.

Nearly 95% of seabirds are colonial, leading to the usage, seabird colony, sometimes called a rookery.

In a profound example, a seabird colony transfers considerable nitrogen into infertile soils, thereby altering plant growth.

Consequently, rails would linger around in the seabird colony, be on the lookout for finches which had just cracked open an egg, chase these away, and consume the egg's contents.

So, to overcome this uncertainty, we created life-sized, replica seabird colonies, each with a known number of individuals.