Why Are Puffins

Vanishing? The Hunt

for Clues Goes Deep
https://nyti.ms/2LCzCrJ

(Into Their Burrows)

Climate

Overfishing, hunting and

pollution are putting pressure on
the birds, but climate change may
prove to be the biggest challenge.

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Photographs and video by JOSH HANER
AUG. 29, 2018

GRIMSEY ISLAND, Iceland — 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 here, 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 here 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,
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and placed it in a vial for analysis; she wants
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 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 have been
havebeen listed
beenlisted as
listedas “vulnerable”
“vulnerable” by
as“vulnerable”
https://nyti.ms/2LCzCrJ
the International Union for Conservation of Nature, meaning they
faceClimate
aaahigh
high risk
highrisk of
riskof extinction
ofextinction in
extinctionin the
inthe wild
wild.
thewild

The birds are cherished

cherished
cherishedby by Icelanders
byIcelanders as
Icelandersas part
aspart of
partof their
oftheir history,
theirhistory,
history,
culture
culture and
cultureand
andtourist
tourist trade — and, for some, their cuisine. “The puffin
touristtrade
trade
is the most common bird in Iceland,” said Erpur Snaer Hansen,
acting director of the South Iceland Nature Research Center. “It’s
also the most hunted one.”

[Read more: InIn Iceland,

InIceland, Vikings
Iceland,Vikings razed
Vikingsrazed the
razedthe forests
theforests long
forestslong ago.
longago. Can
ago.Can the
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the
country
country regrow
countryregrow them?]
them?
regrowthem?

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,” Dr. Hansen said.

Dr. Hansen is working with Dr. Fayet, aaajunior

junior research
juniorresearch fellow
researchfellow at
fellowat
at
the
the University
theUniversity of
Universityof Oxford
Oxford who is from France, on her project to
ofOxford
monitor 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.

During a recent stop at Lundey Island, Iceland, Dr. Hansen

encountered jovial hunters who had killed hundreds of the birds
and were carrying them toward their boats to be sold to restaurants
that mainly serve the meat to curious tourists.

Dr. Hansen maintains an amicable relationship with hunters and

uses data from 138 years of hunting club records in his research.
He convinced these hunters to let his assistant photograph the head
of every puffin; the bands on their beaks can be counted to
determine the birds’ age.
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 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 40 miles per hour or more as Dr. Fayet and Dr.
Hansen did their work. Dr. Fayet wears contact lenses, and the grit
https://nyti.ms/2LCzCrJ
was a torment. There were ticks, so many ticks. Wow, science.
Climate
There were also counterbalancing pleasures; Dr. Hansen, a gifted
cook, roasted a leg of lamb for dinner with garlic and thyme, and
he brought along a couple of bottles of excellent single-malt
whiskey, one of his non-avian fascinations.

After dinner, the two scientists worked into the bright Arctic night,
ultimately catching, examining and releasing a dozen birds in their
two-day stay on this island. Between captures, Dr. Fayet leaned on
a rock, staring intently at a cliff face. Suddenly she leapt up and ran
at startling speed across the uneven soil some 150 feet to the cliff,
crouching in front of the one hole among many that she saw a bird
jet into.

Dr. 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. Dr. 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. Each
tracker costs more than $800, which means the case containing
them was worth more than the battered truck the researchers were
driving.

Dr. Fayet plucked five feathers for later DNA analysis to determine
the bird’s sex. For identification from afar, she used a marker to put
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a3stroke of blue on its breast and white correction fluid to put a dot
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 and returned the puffin to its burrow, where it will no doubt retell
the story for years to come about its abduction by aliens during the
summer of the tags and tape.
https://nyti.ms/2LCzCrJ
Around Iceland, the puffins have suffered because of the decline of
their favorite food, silvery sand eels, which dangle from the
Climate
parents’ beaks as they bring them to their young. That collapse
correlates to a rise in sea surface temperatures that Dr. 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
Atlantic Multidecadal
AtlanticMultidecadal
Multidecadal
Oscillation
Oscillation, with periods of colder water alternating with warmer.
Oscillation
Between the 1965-1995 cold cycle and the current warm cycle, Dr.
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.

The picture is complicated; the natural cycles make it difficult to

disentangle the influence of climate change. That influence is
“much weaker in the subpolar North Atlantic, especially near
Iceland,” said Rong Zhang, a senior scientist with the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid
Dynamics Laboratory.

Still, climate change’s imprint is increasingly evident, said Andrew

Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “There will
come a time when climate change is vastly greater than internal
variability,” he said.

Without as many sand eels in the water, the birds have to fly farther
to find food for themselves and their chicks. So the data from the
GPS Read. Watch.
loggers, however Listen. Four-
briefly transmitted, is of great interest. As
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Dr. Fayet sat
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 Norway sent the first data from their work the week before, and her
screen filled with looping paths of foraging birds. “Because this is
the first time this is being done, we have no expectations,” she said.
“Everything we get is exciting.”
https://nyti.ms/2LCzCrJ
Even thrilling data can contain a sad message. “Everywhere, they
Climate
are going further than we thought,” she said. The colonies’ decline
suggests these birds are working too hard for their supper. “Flying,
for puffins, is very demanding,” she said. “It is a big energy cost
for them.”

Dr. Hansen’s puffin rallies show that 40 percent 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. Dr. 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 realize it’s cold, and not moving.”

There are still millions of Atlantic puffins, but their plentiful

colonies are deceiving, Dr. 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.”

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