The North Sea puffin may be the most visible victim of our sick oceans, but is it cute enough to inspire a rescue effort?
Even after retirement, Mike Harris devotes two months a year on the Isle of May, a small and desolate nature reserve off the coast of Scotland, as a research fellow with the Centre for Hydrology and Ecology, monitoring one of Britain’s puffin colonies—the largest in the North Sea. Puffins appear on land only a few months a year, just long enough to rear their young, which means the photogenic birds spend most of their 30-year life span entirely at sea, diving into the water, using their wings to propel them far below the surface, to feed on small fish and plankton. Harris is cautious about making public proclamations of threats to the birds. “It takes quite a big jolt before I’m prepared to say there is something the matter.”

The big jolt came during this year’s breeding season. A survey showed a 30 per cent reduction in the number of nesting pairs on the island. Returning adults also weighed less than in the past, which suggests they are having problems finding food in the winter. Across the cold, choppy sea, the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research also reported a 10 per cent decline. Although these numbers don’t spell the imminent demise of the North Sea puffins, scientists are particularly worried because until recently the puffin was considered a conservation success story—its population shot up from 29,000 in the entire North Sea in the 1970s to 69,000 in the Isle of May in 2003. Because they don’t congregate on the high seas during winter months, local environmental disasters, like oil spills, tend not to kill large numbers all at once. “If you have lost a lot of puffins it means that something big has happened over a substantial area,” says Harris.

... contd.