Puffins are hunted for eggs, feathers, and meat as they unfortunately are considered a delicacy on the Faroe Islands, but even in Scotland are only a few thousand Puffins left.
The UK Puffin population is about 580,000 pairs, more than 80% of them in Scotland. The biggest problem they face is probably changes in the availability of their prey, especially sandeels.
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Our local population has crashed and will probably not recover due to sandeel shortage a couple of years ago, the adults ended up feeding snipe and the pufflings failed to thrive.
Caroline in Jersey
Cin J
Dear 'AIKI", dear Caroline, thank you both for your answers. Aiki mentioned 1,160,000 as the current population of UK's Puffins, I read recently that the real number is less than 30,000 for Great Britain. You both mentioned the decline of sandeels as the probably main reason for the decline of the Puffin. I didn't know sandeels too have been exploited so much for human food, more for industrial fishing to make animal food/granules for animal feed and fertilizer. Increasing fishing of them is thought to be causing problems for some of their natural predators, especially the Auks which catch sandeels in deeper water than Puffins do. If the RSPB could again connect a population crash of sea birds in British waters to industrial fishing for sandeels it could lead to more political pressure for the exclusion of all non-British fishing companies who currently fish our waters empty, rather than again closing our own fishing industry only to not offend the Spaniards, Italians, Germans, Danes etc., who are fishing our British waters empty. I bet that the alarmingly sharp decline of UK seabird populations could subsequently slow down. It would mean more work for the British Coast Guard. Dejan Djordjevic
Puffin population data here: http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/page-2966#populatyion. Where does your 30,000 figure come from? Fairly sure a decline from 580,000 pairs in 2002 (from the very thorough Seabird 2000 survey) to 15,000 today would have been noticed!
Thank you for the DEFRA link Aiki, although I don't believe it admits the decline of birds here in Great Britain in honest numbers. I think they try to not panic us. If people would be informed about the state our nature is in for real ...
Numbers of breeding pairs of Puffins are counted primarily by recording apparently occupied burrows (AOBs). There is therefore much more chance that the DEFRA figures are an underestimate than an overestimate, as some occupied burrows will certainly have been missed - the many volunteers who gathered the data wouldn't have had unlimited time to watch each colony.
I met and worked with the four scientists who collated the Seabird 2000 data, incidentally. They're all typical scientists, committed to establishing the truth - there's no reason to accuse them of fabricating or falsifying data. Indeed, the Seabird 2000 results showed evidence of really worrying declines in some seabird species since the late 1980s, including Arctic Skua, Arctic Tern and Little Tern. Puffin numbers, though, were up by 19%.
The Seabird 2000 data is 10 years old now and the next full census of seabirds throughout the UK is being planned, this will reveal national population trends since 2002. There is some local evidence that Puffin numbers are falling again - for example, on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth, there were 69,000 pairs of Puffins in 2003 but only 45,000 in 2008 (numbers have been stable since then, though).
Just to add - there probably is cause for concern with our Puffins, and there have certainly been some local declines/extinctions in the last 10 years (as mentioned by Germain). The problem of sandeel availability is most likely down to both overfishing, affecting the sandeels' numbers, and climate change, affecting where they can be found and whether the Puffins can access enough within a reasonable distance of their nesting colonies. Both issues need to be addressed, for Puffins and for marine life in general.
The reason I've brought up the Seabird 2000 figures is that only with the most accurate population data can we make meaningful assessments of the situation as it is now, and the impact that any conservation measures may be having.