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Fauna of the Isles of Scilly

  • 27 min read
  • 13 chapters

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Historical overview

There are few pre-19th-century records for animals. William Borlase published The Natural History of Cornwall in 1758, commenting on the number of rabbits, and Jonathan Couch's A Cornish Fauna gave an account of some the animals known in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. In the 19th century, following the fashion of the time, birds were shot and stuffed, especially by Augustus Smith and his predecessors on Tresco. Egg collecting was allowed and in the Natural History Museum there are, in the collection, forty-five eggs taken between 1880 and 1936 from Annett, even though it was a bird sanctuary. Newspapers recorded some of the fish caught but there was little recording of other groups of animals.

It was in the 20th century when regular accounts can be found for other animal groups following visits from naturalists who often published their observations in the scientific literature. For example, William Bristow visited the islands on three occasions from 1927 to 1934, recording spiders including on some of the uninhabited islands. The Cornwall Bird Watching and Preservation Society published bird reports from the 1930s onwards and the Isles of Scilly Bird Group (founded 2000) took over publishing their own annual reports – Isles of Scilly Bird and Natural History Review – which included other groups of animals such as the diptera.

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Monotypic taxonTaxonomic group with only one subordinate taxonSpecies descriptionFormal description of a discovered speciesParaphylyType of taxonomic groupIUCN Red ListInventory of the global conservation status of biological speciesSubtropicsGeographic and climate zoneCommon nameName generally used for a taxon, group of taxa or organism(s)