News

Steve Sutcliffe

Co-founder of the Friends of Skokholm & Skomer and Extraordinary Volunteer

Remembering Steve Sutcliffe (1946-2025)

Lizzie Wilberforce and Anna Sutcliffe

We have such sad news. Stephen Sutcliffe died recently. He was founder of the Friends of Skokholm and Skomer, along with his wife Anna and John Lewis. The first meeting was held in 1981 in John’s living room with Helen and Anna doing all the catering. Steve was a member, a chairman and many more things until his death on 13th November 2025. 

Steve was also a very long-term supporter of the South and West Wales Wildlife Trust’s work and deeply passionate about the Welsh environment.  He was a member of the Trust as a teenager, so for at least 60 years.  He was the best kind of critical friend, and a man who committed his full energy to making the changes he wanted to see.

In 1952 his family moved to Tenby and his love of boats and wildlife began. His interest in bird watching and wildlife became a deep passion from a young age, and at 15 years old he cashed all his savings and bought his first pair of binoculars (his mother was furious and said the ‘fad’ would not last)! But a cycle ride to Orielton firmed up a friendship with Ronald Lockley and the fascination with birds and islands too, with his first visit to Skokholm in 1962. In his words, he was “more or less obsessed by the Pembrokeshire islands” forever after. 

A chance meeting in 1966 in Tenby linked him up with bird ringers who went over to ring the cormorants on St Margaret’s Island off Caldey. One of them, Harry Green became his ringing trainer; Steve gained his bird ringing A-permit in 1976.

During that time, he was also General Manager of Shell Oil Distribution for South Wales. The depot was in Haverfordwest and he and the then director of the wildlife trust, David Saunders used to munch sandwiches together whilst mulling over wildlife management issues. Steve was on the Islands committee and many other bird and island orientated committees too numerous to mention, often taking a turn as Chairman and Treasurer. 

Skokholm was the first island Stephen and Anna ran together, for a week in 1979, while the warden and cook had a holiday off the island. The vicious Fastnet Race storm during that week only increased the magnetism of islands!

In the early 1980’s a group of volunteers gathered on Skokholm to round up and remove the goats from the island with the help of the RAF. Just one visitor was staying, a farmer who had a good knowledge of animal behaviour, helping the team to find the last two goats. This man, John Lewis, became a firm friend and it was over mugs of hot tea and chocolate biscuits on Skokholm that John shared an idea stimulated by him being a member of the Friends of St Kilda. Steve and Anna were fully in support of this grand idea and the ‘Friends of Skomer and Skokholm’ was founded soon after.

The next island chapter began with Mike and Roseanne Alexander leaving Skomer in 1985. Steve, with a lot of encouragement from Anna, applied for, and got the job as Warden on Skomer Island (1986-1994). Skomer brought together his passion and knowledge of seabirds, his skills as a ringer, his ability to lead and all the entrepreneurial energy and contacts from his day job, for the benefit of Pembrokeshire’s ecology. He wrote the gull breeding bird monitoring guide for JNCC /Joint Nature Conservancy Council. Ben was nearly born on Skokholm in March 1987 and lived on Skomer until he was 7.5 years old.

Once off the island and working as the Manager of the Pembrokeshire team for the Prince’s Trust, he also managed to commit his time to being on the board of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) taking on the role of Treasurer and receiving a Jubilee medal (1998) for his outstanding work and committed devotion to the BTO. 

Between 2010 and 2014, he led the restoration of the buildings on Skokholm, after the Trust’s purchase of the island. The Trust had received quotes for the work from contractors totalling over a million pounds, but Steve could see a better way, using Skomer and Skokholm island volunteers who would happily devote their time and practical skills to refurbishing the Skokholm buildings, just as had been done with the chalets and information centre and toilets on Skomer during his wardenship. 

He did what he was always so good at: organising and motivating people, harnessing his wide network of local connections in industry as well the wider islands community and led the way with a volunteer-focussed grassroots project that delivered the restoration for only £70,000, but investing over 20,000 hours of volunteer time. Once the buildings were back in shape, he worked constructively with Trust staff to support the island to regain its accreditation as a Bird Observatory and continued to coordinate annual work parties for maintenance works as well as new projects.  For this gargantuan amount of work and devotion Steve received The Marsh Award from Prince Phillip on behalf of The Friends of Skokholm and Skomer.

The following year Steve was awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for this work (2015).

The whole of Steve’s life was marked by his passion for seabirds, for Pembrokeshire’s islands, and for ringing. He led on some very long-term seabird studies, such as the decades-long ringing study of Cormorants on St Margaret’s Island, catching and ringing ~4,000 over the years. He was always fascinated by gulls and was heavily involved in gull ringing on St Margarets and Caldey, only recently having added a colour-ringing project to that portfolio.

As well as being a proficient bird ringer for so many decades, as a kind and patient trainer, he supported many others to learn to ring. The first conference run by the Pembrokeshire Bird Group was started by Steve in 1984 and continues to this day.

With Bob Haycock, he set up the South Pembrokeshire Ringing Group (now the Pembrokeshire Ringing Group) on the 1st January 1991, a group which was very proactive in developing new projects, setting up studies to investigate the use of reed beds by warblers, and ringing Storm Petrels on Skomer and at the Deer Park Marloes on the mainland. 

Steve’s project to colour ring Yellowhammers at two sites has provided better understanding of the populations of these Red listed birds in mid-Pembrokeshire.

The most recent project set up by Steve with Anna was to increase the seabird diversity on the now, rat-free islands of Caldey and St Margarets. Within weeks of the speakers calling at night, Manx shearwaters were investigating the coastal slopes around the nest boxes and the storm petrels were flying around and going into the holes in the stone walls. Steve was so excited about this project, even when exhausted from the Leukaemia he managed to get up to see this happening at night being driven by one of the islanders on Caldey to see this groundbreaking and exciting result. This is a first for the UK using speakers as well as nest boxes on an island that has not had these seabirds nesting previously, although this combination has been tried and tested in New Zealand.

The volume of knowledge he generated for ornithology is phenomenal. Surveying and contributing to Nest records, Wetland Bird Survey counts (mostly at Marloes Mere), Breeding Bird Surveys, Winter Bird surveys, the 2007-11 Bird Atlas counts and the Seabird Monitoring Programme, his sites being on Caldey and St Margaret’s Islands from the late 1967 to 2025, and those are only a few of the many recording schemes he took part in.

Steve was a magic combination of curiosity and dynamism. He wrote regularly for bulletins and journals, sharing the results of his research, and published papers on a range subjects including gull populations in southwest Wales and Common Scoter in Carmarthen Bay. He contributed substantial texts to the 2021 publication The Birds of Wales.

He also contributed to the work of many other bird groups and committees, including the Pembrokeshire Bird Group, Pembrokeshire Ornithological Research, Islands Conservation Advisory Committee, and the Welsh Ornithological Society (WOS). He joined WOS Council in 2015, and as a Council member he helped formulate responses to important consultations and contributed to their Grants Panel. In 2018 he took the role of Treasurer and did the job until 2022. 

Steve’s legacy will live on in so many ways: in the people he trained, mentored, and influenced; the people he introduced to wildlife for the first time as Skomer warden; the work of the Skokholm Bird Observatory; the new projects he had just initiated on Caldey. He was a project manager like no other, with an endless stream of ideas and an ability to inspire and motivate others to get involved. He and his wife Anna were an incredible team and touched the lives of so many. He will be greatly missed.