#Fraterculini

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"Don't Look Down," by Brian Matthews

via Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards

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  ©Jeroen Van Nieuwenhove

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Tufted puffins (Fratercula cirrhata) preen on a cliff. A study found between 3,150 and 8,500 seabirds died over a four-month period from October 2016 in the Bering Sea, probably because of climate breakdown.

Photograph: Danita Delimont/Alamy

(via The week in wildlife – in pictures | Environment | The Guardian)

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Climate crisis may be a factor in tufted puffins die-off, study says | The Guardian

The death of thousands of tufted puffins in the Bering Sea may have been partly caused by the climate breakdown, according to a study.

Between 3,150 and 8,500 seabirds died over a four-month period from October 2016, with hundreds of severely emaciated carcasses washed up on the beaches of the Pribilofs Islands in the southern Bering Sea, 300 miles (480km) west of the Alaskan mainland.

Researchers believe the birds died of starvation partly caused by a loss of energy-rich prey species, which was triggered by increased sea and atmospheric temperatures, as well as reductions in winter sea ice recorded since 2014.

Tufted puffins breeding in the Bering Sea feed on fish and other marine invertebrates, which in turn feed on plankton. The loss of nutritious prey species caused by the climate crisis is also affecting populations of the Atlantic puffin around Britain and Iceland.

Researchers in the journal Plos One documented the Bering Sea “wreck”, or mass die-off, with the help of a citizen science programme in which tribal and community members on St Paul Island recovered more than 350 carcasses of adult birds in the process of moulting, a vulnerable moment in the bird’s lifecycle when they require plentiful food.

According to the study, by Timothy Jones of the citizen science Coasst programme, at the University of Washington, and Lauren Divine, from the Aleut community of St Paul Island’s ecosystem conservation office, puffins typically made up fewer than 1% of recovered carcasses in the region in previous years. In this die-off, 87% of carcasses were puffins, with the remainder being the crested auklet, another North American seabird.

Increased sea temperatures have reduced food resources for puffins in the southern Bering Sea, as some marine species shift further north.

Puffins spend much of their lives at sea, only returning to land to breed each spring. Similar reductions in food supplies close to traditional breeding grounds are also pushing Atlantic puffins further north. It is predicted Atlantic puffins are unlikely to be seen south of the northernmost islands of Scotland by the second half of this century.

A seabird wreck along the Atlantic coasts of Britain, Ireland and Spain after the storms of 2013-14 resulted in the deaths of at least 54,000 birds, of which 55% were Atlantic puffins. The long-term impact of such events is not well understood but fewer than 60% of 2013’s breeding adults returned to the small Welsh island of Skomer the following year.

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The ‘Puffin Census’ commenced this week on the Farne islands off the Northumberland coast

Photograph: Paul Kingston/NNP/National Trust

(via The week in wildlife – in pictures | Environment | The Guardian)

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A world without puffins? The uncertain fate of the much-loved seabirds | The Guardian

By late May, the island is covered in a violet haze of bluebells mixed with red campion. Together with its neighbouring island Skokholm, Skomer is home to the highest concentration of Manx shearwaters in the world. But here on the narrow, high isthmus of land that still just connects Skomer’s main landmass to a smaller outcrop known as The Neck, it is puffins (a type of auk) that are in the ascendant. With this year’s count recording nearly 31,000 individuals, up from 14,000 in 2013, breeding adults are even starting to encroach into what were once “Manxie” burrows.

“We need to be cautious. We might have had an optimal day for counting them this year,” observes Eddie Stubbings, one of Skomer’s two wardens. But whatever the exact number, there is now a housing problem on the slopes where puffins hang out in the brilliant late-afternoon sunshine. A puffin takeover has begun in earnest. This involves the portly little birds marching into shearwater burrows and determinedly dragging out the hapless inhabitants. Graceful in the air but helpless on land, the shearwater becomes easy prey for hungry gulls. Bird EZ88918 is one of three puffins Baker discovers today that have commandeered burrows known previously to have been home to a pair of breeding shearwaters.

The apparently rude health of this Welsh puffin population is in marked contrast to the species’ catastrophic decline in what were once thriving colonies on Shetland. The RSPB’s seabird specialist Dr Ellie Owen confirms that on 20 monitored sites across Shetland, the 33,000 puffins counted in the last nationwide census in 2000 have plummeted to just 570 individuals. A Further afield, these auks are also in dire straits: Norway has seen vertiginous crashes, with hundreds of thousands of adult puffins in the once-teeming colony of Røst struggling to fledge any chicks in recent years.

Working out the reasons behind the dramatic seesawing in the populations of this seabird – as well as why there have recently been devastating declines in some other seabird species, such as kittiwakes – is now exercising the brains of seabird scientists across the country.

Seabird counts have, for example, revealed the magnitude of climate-change effects – “even though, when monitoring started, no one had heard of it,” says Prof Tim Birkhead of Sheffield university. He has been monitoring the population and breeding success of another British auk numerous on Skomer, the guillemot, for four decades. Climate change has warmed the oceans, and scientists suspect that this is forcing cold-water fish species further north, meaning, in turn, that seabirds struggle to find food close to their traditional breeding grounds. “It’s only if you have accurate knowledge of what is happening to bird populations that there is any chance of taking action,” says Birkhead.

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Atlantic puffins courtship billing at Maine Coastal Island National Wildlife Refuge

credit: USFWS

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This Atlantic Puffin was caught on camera with a mouthful of fish. Picture: Mike Meysner/Caters (via Pictures of the day: 24 July 2014 - Telegraph)

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His Land… (by Christian Schweiger)

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Audubon Scientists Uncover Winter Home of Maine Atlantic Puffins | Audubon

Until recently, little was known about the movements and distribution of Maine’s Atlantic Puffins outside of the breeding season in May to August. In 2011, Audubon researchers recovered geolocators from two puffins tagged at Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge back in 2009. These two tracking devices suggested a northward journey to the Gulf of St. Lawrence—a region known for abundant forage fish, a key food source-- after the nesting season, before a southward movement ranging from the Labrador Sea to Bermuda in winter months. This was the first hint of puffins’ actual winter homes.

“Puffins are perfectly at home at sea. A surprise to many is that adult puffins spend about eight months resting and sleeping on the waves,” said Kress. “They can drink salt water and eat under waves too.  Young puffins are even more ocean going, spending at least the first two years of life on the water without ever stepping foot onto land.”

Studies continued with improved, smaller geolocation devices to rule out speculations that earlier models affected puffins’ breeding behavior and migration routes. Since 2010, 38 advanced geolocators were attached by Audubon researchers to leg bands on puffins from Matinicus Rock and Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge. By March 2015, 19 of these trackers were recovered from returning puffins.

Data showed the birds travelled a northward distance in August to the western Gulf of St. Lawrence. The data also showed that as days shortened the puffins left the Gulf of St. Lawrence and headed south to the U.S. Continental Shelf-- well offshore from New York and New Jersey where they spent the rest of the winter on water—before arriving back to Maine’s islands by early April.

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Atlantic Puffins in Maine (USFWS Photo)

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Hundreds of Tufted Puffin Deaths Suggest Dangers of Warming Seas | surfbirds

In October, the first Tufted Puffin carcasses washed up on a chilly beach on St. Paul Island, a lonely Bering Sea outpost between Russia and Alaska. At first, local residents didn’t think much of the dead birds; they were used to finding seabirds battered by violent weather near the island. But as the days passed, puffins continued to arrive. Within weeks, hundreds more had drifted onto the island’s beaches, apparently dead from starvation.

The dead Tufted Puffins add another mass mortality event to a string of recent seabird die-offs along the Pacific coast. Last year, around 8,000 Common Murres washed up in one of the largest die-offs in Alaskan history. A year before that, thousands of Cassin’s Auklets were found dead on beaches from California to British Columbia.

In a region that has seen back-to-back years of record-breaking high ocean temperatures, yet another case of seabird mortality is unsettling scientists. The emaciated seabird carcasses could point to ongoing changes in ocean ecosystems in response to climate change, they say.

“What I keep coming back to is that we didn’t used to see this,” says Julia Parrish, a professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington. She heads the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a network of citizen scientists that have counted seabird carcasses washed up along Alaska’s beaches for eleven years. “We might see mass mortality events every six to eight years,” Parrish says. “Now sometimes it’s twice in one year. In all of the years that COASST has been collecting beach bird data, we have never seen so many mass mortality events so quickly as we have in the last three years.”

Since they found the first emaciated puffin carcasses in October, members of the Aleut community of St. Paul Island have braved high winds and extreme weather to collect nearly 300 of the dead seabirds. However, the data collected on stormswept and isolated beaches on St. Paul likely underestimate how many puffins have died.

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Atlantic puffins (via U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Northeast Region)

Atlantic puffins at Maine Coastal Island National Wildlife Refuge credit: USFWS

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Atlantic Puffins at Maine Coastal Island National Wildlife Refuge (via U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Northeast Region)