Sceilg Mhichíl

Where have all the puffins gone?

Visitors to the Skelligs World Heritage property in August and September often ask “Where have all the puffins gone?”  Sceilg Mhichíl is home to thousands of Atlantic puffins, at least for part of the year. These colourful enigmatic seabirds spend their summers on the island, breeding and fattening their chicks on locally available food which often comprises of high calorie sand-eel and sprat. The island becomes a cacophony of birdcalls each year from April when the puffins arrive and join many other seabirds including shearwaters, petrels, fulmars and kittiwakes competing for nest space on this small island. Come late August the puffins leave, first in dribs and drabs and then practically overnight an eerie quietness descends on the island as the last of the puffins take to the skies, not to return again for another 8 months.  Where they go to nobody knows… that is until recently.  Scientists from the Coastal and Marine Research Centre in University College Cork have answered this question by attaching tiny tracking devices, weighing only 1.5 grams to the birds before they left for the winter. When the puffins returned to the island to breed the following summer, the devices were retrieved, and the information they collected analysed to show the birds movements over the winter months. The data show the puffins, which only weigh around 400 grams, can travel across the entire Atlantic as far as Canada once they leave Ireland at the end of the breeding season. It is likely that the motivation for such a long-distance trip is a temporary abundance of capelin, a small oil-rich fish, which provides a rich source of food for numerous seabirds as well as larger animals such as seals and whales. Once this is depleted, the puffins then turn tail and spend the majority of the winter months in the storm-ravaged seas of the Atlantic ocean, presumably feeding on small fish and zooplankton.

Although puffins have previously been tracked from sites in Scotland and Wales, this Irish study is the first to show puffins making it across the entire Atlantic. Further monitoring work is being planned under the Beaufort Marine Research Awards, which may give us important insights into the health of our oceans, and how puffins may be affected by future changes to the marine environment such as overfishing or climate change.  For further information visit the CMRC website at www.cmrc.ucc.ie <http://www.cmrc.ucc.ie>