Capt’n Coquet’s Chronicles #153
Past times: How we counted the puffins
With another successful Puffin Festival behind us, it’s a good time to think about how the puffins are doing on Coquet Island. To do that, wardens and volunteers set aside a day each year to carry out the Puffin Census. This count is important as it gives us a regular scientific insight into how well the puffin population is doing.
Puffins live on the sea over winter, many on the Atlantic Ocean (hence their full name the “Atlantic Puffin”). If the weather at sea is reasonable over the wintertime, more puffins survive to return to Coquet Island. If the winter is harsh, many puffins perish or get washed up exhausted in large numbers – referred to as a Puffin wreck. We have been lucky over the past few years and lots of puffins have returned.
Puffins nest underground making them difficult to count, so over many years, a standard technique was developed to make sure they were counted in a way that could be compared with counts in the past and in the future. It is difficult, time consuming and disturbing for the birds, to count every burrow so a set of 30 sample areas were chosen (each covering 20 square metres).
It took five or six experienced volunteers to check each burrow for occupancy. This involved looking for evidence such as feathers, discarded fish, a latrine, smell, or even a puffin popping out to object! It also involved putting your arm down the burrow to feel for an egg (or a puffin). Eventually, a long-term researcher devised a battery-powered micro-camera on a long cable, to check burrows quickly and efficiently. This technique was found to be accurate and saved lots of time, reducing disturbance across the colony. With some simple maths, the number of occupied burrows for the entire island was estimated.
Puffins have been doing well, and numbers reached 30,000 pairs five years ago. That’s a remarkable achievement for these hardy, iconic seabirds. The result was so astonishing that we had to repeat the census that year to make sure!
Dr Paul Morrison aka Capt’n Coquet was a Coquet Island manager for 38 years
