An RSPB Scotland project to aid
conservation efforts for puffins has been awarded £49,800 by the Heritage
Lottery Fund.
Puffins are one our most
recognisable and much loved seabirds with their colourful bills and eye
markings. However, in recent years their numbers across the UK and Europe have
plummeted leading to the species being declared vulnerable to global
extinction, with further declines of between 50-79 percent estimated by 2065
(1). Warming seas, caused by climate change, affecting puffins’ food sources
are thought to be one of the main threats to their numbers.
Now thanks to this HLF grant an
innovative project to help these threatened seabirds will take place this year.
Project Puffin (UK) combines the latest technology with citizen science to
tackle three of the biggest challenges hampering conservation efforts for these
charismatic birds; discovering more about what puffins feed their chicks, where
they go to find food and how their numbers are changing.
As over 80 percent of the British
and Irish population of puffins is found in Scotland much of the project’s work
will focus here. Counts will take place at a number of puffin colonies, many of
which have seen an alarming reduction in size. The counts are urgently required
to accurately measure the extent of this decline and assess how puffins are
currently faring.
GPS trackers will be carefully
fitted to puffins at two sites in Scotland. During the summer these 31 tags
will provide information on where parent puffins go to fish to feed their
chick. This will then be combined to generate maps of their offshore feeding
areas during the tracking, and also detail what conditions they need to feed.
Further information on the diet
of puffins will be gathered through the citizen science aspect of the project
taking place while puffins are feeding their chicks during June and July.
Visitors to puffin colonies across the UK and Ireland are asked to take
photographs of the birds with fish in their bills. The project will provide
clear guidelines for this to ensure puffins, which are very sensitive to human
presence around their burrows, and other wildlife are not disturbed, and so
that the photographs provide the most useful data possible. An online portal
will be set up to submit the photographs to; these will build a picture of what
the chicks are being fed.
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