Thanks for the interest in your responses, nice ideas, but both the EA and the Charities commission as you linked to are England & Wales, not Scotland! Although the Scottish equivalents aren't difficult to find.

NERC funding has "Students do not apply directly" written all over it, I thought potential supervisors applied to NERC? Or do they hand out funding alongside the official list of projects?

Has anyone experience of applying for a Carnegie Trust Grant? (http://www.carnegie-trust.org/) I have a superviser willing to work out a PhD project with me if I can secure funding; however, all I can find online is Carnegie (I have a first from a Scottish Uni and would like to do a PhD at Glasgow), which I'll go for. I've had an exhaustive search online for other sources, with no luck. I'm interested in specific research with seabirds as markers of environmental change, building on my work experience with seabird monitoring over the past few years, is it a ridiculous expectation to think I'd get funding being this specific?