The colony was ravaged when the
ship went down in 1816, and the island's puffin population has never fully
recovered
19:00, 11 SEP 2018
UPDATED19:51, 11 SEP 2018
The bird population of Puffin
Island has spent 200 years trying to recover from a shipwreck that brought
unwelcome stowaways to its shores.
At the peak, more than 50,000
puffins resided on the island, just off the east coast of Anglesey.
But a shipwreck in the 1800s
plagued it with brown rats. Their number exploded, and the consequences for the
puffins were catastrophic.
To this day, the puffins that
give the island its name have never got back up to their previous strength. But
work is going on to try to reverse the damage.
An estimated 500,000 rodents were
on the island by 1971, virtually wiping out the thriving sea bird population,
cutting the number down to around 2000 by 1907, and leaving less than 20 pairs
of puffins by the 1990s.
By 1998 the situation got so bad
that the Countryside Council for Wales (CCW) and the Royal Society for the
Protection of Birds (RSPB) stepped in to eradicate the vermin.
Despite the intervention,
according to Puffin Island Seabird Research, there were only eight breeding
pairs of puffins left on the island in 2010.
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