Scotland's salmon farms kill and trap protected birds and cover it up

Scotland's salmon factory farming industry is concealing the scale of trapped birds and deaths in its cages. We know this because we have the data and what we found is a business failing to tell the truth.

Green Britain Foundation obtained almost 1,000 monitoring reports from NatureScot, Scotland's nature agency, under Freedom of Information laws. These are the returns salmon farms are supposed to submit when recording birds trapped or killed in their nets. What they reveal is an industry that is either unable or unwilling to tell the truth about the damage it causes to wildlife.

Dale Vince OBE, founder of Green Britain Foundation says 

"This is a cover-up, plain and simple, by an industry already riddled with poor practice. It's not just sea life being harmed by salmon farming, it's birds too. This isn't incompetence it's 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."

The data records 532 incidents of trapped wild birds and 129 deaths including 48 dead common gulls, 36 dead lesser black-backed gulls and 22 dead herring gulls, all species on the UK's Red List of birds of conservation concern. But these figures almost certainly represent a fraction of what is really happening.

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. Norwegian-owned Mowi, Scotland's largest salmon farming operator, had just two sites report any trapped birds in 2025.

The camera doesn't lie

We know the true picture is far worse because we have the footage to prove it.

Video gathered by Green Britain Foundation documents dead and trapped birds at multiple sites that submitted zero or misleading reports to NatureScot.

Among the examples:

• Loch a Chairn Bhain: a dead gull and trapped gulls filmed across two separate visits — nothing reported to NatureScot for either

• Loch Duich: a heron filmed trapped — the farm reported two gulls that month, but 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

The pattern is consistent. Dale Vince says "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. It's a cover-up".

A monitoring system that has failed

Our analysis found monitoring method fields left blank across every single submission from one major operator, no cameras deployed at any of its sites, and top net mesh sizes at levels the regulator itself had flagged as dangerous to gannets.

The sites that appear to be reporting honestly stand out precisely because they dwarf those that don't. Scottish Sea Farms' Bringhead recorded 35 wildlife deaths in 2024 alone. Loch Hourn recorded 62 birds trapped or dead.

NatureScot has spent years developing this monitoring system and collecting nearly 1,000 spreadsheets from the industry. The result is an embarrassment — a dataset so riddled with gaps, errors and apparent dishonesty that it tells us almost nothing reliable about what is actually happening to wildlife at Scotland's salmon farms. For an industry that thrives on exploitation, it should be a source of shame.

What needs to change

We are calling on the Scottish Government to act. NatureScot must abandon this failed exercise and replace it with a system that actually works: mandatory real-time reporting, independent verification, cameras as a condition of licence, and meaningful penalties, including revocation, for operators who lie.

The salmon farming industry is worth hundreds of millions of pounds. The birds dying in its nets have no lobby. It is time the government decided whose side it is on.