#fraterculini

[best-bird-tournament]

Tribe Fraterculini puffin

Which is the best bird?

Rhinoceros auklet

Atlantic puffin

Horned puffin

Tufted puffin

Voting ended onSep 7, 2025

This tribe contains just four species from two genera (Cerorhinca and Fratercula)

[saritawolf]

Tufted Puffin (Fratercula cirrhata) - (c) SaritaWolf - please do not repost

[lasaraconor]

  ©Jeroen Van Nieuwenhove

[dendroica]

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)

[dendroica]

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.

[dendroica]

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)

[dendroica]

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.

[dendroica]

Atlantic puffins courtship billing at Maine Coastal Island National Wildlife Refuge

credit: USFWS