“It was something that used to be an important food, but now it’s more valued for its presence,” she said. “They had to start molting, and they starved to death.”ĭivine said that puffins are important to the local community, who used to harvest them.
“Our interpretation is they ran out of gas,” she said. Tufted puffins are important for the Aleut community on the island of St. Paul were already in molt, leading Parrish to believe that they couldn’t make it far enough south in time that year.
They winter in the open ocean, where they lose their flight feathers and are flightless for several weeks as they grow a new set, diving underwater for food, much as penguins do. Puffins usually passed by the Pribilof Islands by November on their way south, through the Aleutian Islands and out into the open North Pacific. “The lab reports came back indicating that the birds were extremely thin - emaciated - basically starving to death,” said Parrish, a co-author on the study. They shipped a few carcasses off to a federal lab, but tests found no trace of disease, toxins or other pollution that may have led to the seabirds’ deaths. seabird deaths from the Arctic Circle in Alaska to northern California (COASST partners with a Canadian organization that does similar work called British Columbia Beached Bird Survey, or BCBBS, as well as two organizations in California: BeachWatch and BeachCOMBERS), often with the help of citizen scientists.ĭivine and her Aleut colleagues found that 87% of the dead birds were tufted puffins. “They were really late,” said Julia Parrish, a professor of ocean fishery sciences at the University of Washington and the executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), an organization that monitors U.S. People in the community had a pretty good idea which birds turned up dead and when they would likely appear, but they had never seen anything close to the number of tufted puffins washing up dead on the shore. ©Aleut Community of St Paul Island Ecosystem Conservation Office “They don’t fledge, or they don’t make it over the winter.” Nineteen tufted puffins were found on North Beach, on the island of St. Paul’s Island Ecosystem Conservation Office and a co-author of a study describing the die-off published in PLOS ONE. “There are particular times of year when birds die,” said Lauren Divine, Director of the Aleut Community of St. Paul, some 1,000 to 1,500 miles from their normal wintering area long after they should have passed by on their journey south. By the following January, about 360 tufted puffins ( Fratercula cirrhata) and crested auklets ( Aethia cristatella) turned up dead on St. The sightings prompted wildlife technicians who monitor for dead or injured birds began to watch the coastline more closely. Local Aleuts had begun to find seabirds washed up on the north and southeast beaches of the island, located in the Bering Sea off the western coast of Alaska.
It was the end of October 2016 when the first reports of dead puffins and auklets began trickling in on the small Pribilof island of St. Hundreds of tufted puffins were found washed up dead on beaches in the Pribilof Islands of Alaska in fall and winter of last year.