Scientists aim to uncover why puffin population is on the wane

Work is under way to root out the cause of a worrying decline in the global population of puffins.

While the beloved birds are thriving in parts of the UK, including the remote Skomer Island off the coast of Pembrokeshire, elsewhere their numbers are on the wane.

In Iceland, for example, there are 25% fewer puffins than there were in 2002.

Conservationists are keen to find out why that is and research partly funded by Sky Ocean Rescue is hoping to get to the bottom of it.

Tiny GPS tracking devices and state-of-the-art cameras are being put to use on Skomer, where the technology is being attached to a handful of the auks so that scientists can discover where they go in search of food, how they catch it, and what exactly they are feeding on.

Managed by The Wildlife Trust Of South and West Wales, the study will also include analysis of puffin droppings to determine what their favourite fish is.

Seabird scientist Annette Fayet told Sky News: "Skomer is quite unusual because it's one of the few colonies where puffins are doing quite well.

"The numbers are even increasing and the breeding success is very high, so most puffins that try to have a chick actually are successful at raising it.

"We're not sure why they are doing so well compared to other colonies. The main thing we want to do is understand the feeding ecology of puffins because we don't know much about that at the moment."

Once the research has been carried out on Skomer, Ms Fayet will travel to Iceland and Norway.

Both have far bigger populations of puffins than the UK, with 1.7m breeding pairs in Norway and up to 4m in Iceland, but both populations are significantly down.

The Norway leg of the research project is what is being funded by Sky Ocean Rescue - and it could prove vital.

Ms Fayet said: "The numbers have crashed so much in Norway and my collaborators there have reported zero breeding success in the last few decades. This is probably the worst colony for puffin breeding success in the world.

"The Sky Ocean Rescue funding means a lot for me because it's really going to help make my research better. By adding an extra colony in the study, I will have a bigger picture of the problem."

Plastic pollution is not thought to be as great of a concern for puffins as it is for other marine life, but there are still worries about its potential impact.

The birds were designated an endangered species in 2015 and researchers have encountered instances of them struggling to coexist with human waste.

Birgitta Bueche, a warden on Skomer, told Sky News: "We have to change, we really do, because all the calculations of the scientists show that our seabirds are in real trouble.

"We're expecting puffins to go extinct within the next hundred years if we can't stop the trend, so we really need to make a big change to keep our seabirds safe."

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