WHY ARE PUFFINS VANISHING?
The hunt for clues goes deep into their burrows, writes
PUFFINS are in trouble. The birds have been in precipitous decline, especially since the 2000s, both in Iceland and across many of their Atlantic habitats.
The potential culprits are many: fickle prey, overfishing, pollution. Scientists say that climate change is another underlying factor that is diminishing food supplies and is likely to become more important over time. And the fact that puffins are tasty, and thus hunted as game in Iceland, hardly helps.
Annette Fayet is trying to solve the mystery of the dwindling Atlantic puffins, and that is why she was reaching shoulder deep into a burrow on Grimsey Island, Iceland, last month. She gently drew a puffin out, having snagged its leg with a thick wire she had curved into a shepherd’s crook. As she brought the croaking seabird into the light, it defecated copiously on her pants, which were, thanks to her long experience with birds, waterproof.
“Wow, science!” she said, and smiled. Ideally, this bird, with its tuxedo-like black-and-white plumage and clownish orange beak, would have voided its bowels into a stainless steel bowl she calls the “puffin toilet”. She took a flat wooden spoon out of its wrapper, scraped the mess up and placed it in a vial for analysis; she wants to know what these birds have been eating.
Though some puffin colonies are prospering, in Iceland, where the largest population of Atlantic puffins is found, their numbers have dropped from roughly seven million individuals to about 5.4 million. Since 2015, the birds have been listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, meaning they face a high risk of extinction in the wild.
The birds are cherished by Icelanders as part of their history, culture and tourist trade — and, for some, their cuisine. “The puffin is the most common bird in Iceland,” said Erpur Snaer Hansen, acting director of the South Iceland Nature Research Centre. “It’s also the most hunted one.”
Hunters with long nets can be seen tooling around Grimsey Island in the summer, leaving behind piles of bird carcasses, the breast meat stripped away. Iceland has restricted the annual harvest, but hunting “is accelerating the decline”, Hansen said.
Hansen is working with Fayet on her project, which involves monitoring the activities of four puffin colonies, two in Iceland and others in Wales and Norway. Since 2010, he also has conducted a census, a twice-yearly “puffin rally” in which he travels more than 3,100 miles around Iceland, visiting some 700 marked burrows in 12 colonies, counting eggs and chicks.
On Grimsey, a northern island that pokes above the Arctic Circle, gulls and arctic terns swirled in the cloudy sky and the wind at the cliffs blew at 40mph or more as Fayet and Hansen did their work.
Hansen moved from burrow to burrow, looking a little like a spaceman with his white visor clamped over his eyes. He snaked a camera on a flexible stalk inside for a look around. “Oh, yeah,” he said, having spotted a live, downy chick.
After extracting a bird, they slid it into a plastic tube that oddly enough kept it calm, and weighed it. Hansen attached a steel identifying band to the bird’s leg. Then they removed it from the tube and attached a tiny GPS tracker to its back, between the wings, with marine tape.
In the week until the lightweight devices drop off, they show how far the birds fly for their food and how deep they dive for it.
Around Iceland, the puffins have suffered because of the decline of their favourite food, silvery sand eels, which dangle from the parents’ beaks as they bring them to their young. That collapse correlates to a rise in sea surface temperatures that Hansen has been monitoring for years.
The temperature of waters around the country is governed by long-term cycles of what is known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, with periods of colder water alternating with warmer. Between the 1965-1995 cold cycle and the current warm cycle, Hansen said, winter temperature records show about one degree Celsius of additional warming — a seemingly small amount, but disastrous for the sand eels. His theory, he said, is this: “If you increase temperatures one degree, you’re changing their growth rates and their ability to survive the winter,” he said.
Aevar Petersen, an Icelandic ornithologist, not involved with the project, said an increase in sea temperature brought about by climate change was “the key environmental factor” behind the sand eels’ decline.
Without as many sand eels in the water, the birds have to fly farther to find food for themselves and their chicks.
Hansen’s puffin rallies show that 40 per cent of the population of Icelandic puffin chicks is losing body mass over time, another bad sign.
When the adults can’t catch enough to feed themselves and the chicks, they make an instinctive Malthusian choice; the chicks starve. Fayet called her quest “heartbreaking”: “You put your hand in the burrow and feel with your hand a little ball on the floor, but then you realise it’s cold, and not moving.”
There are still millions of Atlantic puffins, but their plentiful colonies are deceiving, Hansen said. “These birds are long lived, so you don’t just see them plummeting down,” he said.
In the long run, he warned, “It’s not sustainable.”
Though some puffin colonies are prospering, in Iceland, where the largest population of Atlantic puffins is found, their numbers have dropped from roughly seven million individuals to about 5.4 million. Since 2015, the birds have been listed as ‘vulnerable’...