Tufted puffins are shouting a warning from the middle of the Bering Sea, and we need to listen to them. As our oceans warm, these beautiful birds are starving to death.
Alaska’s four Pribilof Islands sit between mainland Alaska and Russia. The islands support more than two million seabirds, which survive by feeding on plankton and fish in the nutrient-rich Bering Sea. With so many birds in one area, it’s not unusual to occasionally find dead ones, but alarm bells sounded when biologists learned more than 350 dead birds had washed up on the beaches of St. Paul Island, the largest of the Pribilof Islands. This number is seventy times higher than the annual average count of five bird carcasses. Stranger still, most of these dead birds were tufted puffins, a bird that rarely washes up on the beach after it dies.
Biologists knew the birds they’d found dead represented only a fraction of the total, so they applied a computer model using wind patterns and ocean currents to determine what percentage of the dead birds likely reached the shore. From this percentage, they calculated somewhere between 3,150 and 8,800 birds perished in late 2016. Even if you choose to believe the low end of this estimate, the numbers are astounding.
Two species of puffins live in Alaskan waters. The horned puffin (Fratercula corniculata) and the tufted puffin (Fratercula cirrhata) belong to the family Alcidae, which also includes guillemots, murres, murrelets, auklets, and auks. A tufted puffin has a black body, a white face, and a red and yellow bill. Its common name is derived from the long tufts of yellow feathers curling back from behind the eye on each side of the head. Adult tufted puffins measure 14 inches (36 cm) in length and weigh 1.7 lbs. (771 g).
What killed the puffins?
The dead birds recovered from the beach appeared emaciated with weak flight muscles and almost no body fat. The birds had starved to death, but why?
Puffins feed on small fish, and until recently, many resided in the Pribilof Islands so they could gorge themselves on the abundance of fish in the rich Bering Sea. The icy Bering Sea is rapidly changing, though, as the ocean warms. As the sea ice recedes and thins, pollock, cod, and other fish can no longer find the super-cooled water at the edges of the ice sheet where they like to congregate. Instead, the fish disperse, making them more difficult for puffins to find and catch. Puffins now must travel further to find food, burning precious calories.
Also, as the northern ocean warms, dominant plankton species have shifted from large, meaty forms to smaller less energy-rich species. In turn, the plankton-eating fish are also thinner and provide fewer nutrients to the animals that eat them.
Puffins molt from August to October, and as they replace their feathers, the birds can barely fly and dive, making it difficult to feed themselves unless prey species are plentiful. Biologists were not surprised to learn most of the dead puffins they found on the beaches were in the middle of molting. The birds couldn’t travel far to travel to find food while molting, and they starved to death.
Puffins are not the only species affected by the loss of sea ice in the Bering Sea, and the diminished food source is not the only issue related to the melting ice. Without sea ice clinging to the coast, winter storms now batter the rocky cliffs, causing erosion at an unprecedented rate. These cliffs provide homes for seabirds, and some of the rocky beaches are breeding sites for endangered Steller sea lions.
The Pribilof Islands are a distant place most humans will never visit, but the drama playing out on those remote islands demands our attention now. The puffins are trying to tell us our environment is changing at an alarming rate.
Robin Barefield is the author of three Alaska wilderness mystery novels, Big Game, Murder Over Kodiak, and The Fisherman’s Daughter. To download a free copy of one of her novels, watch her webinar about how she became an author and why she writes Alaska wilderness mysteries. Also, sign up below to subscribe to her free, monthly newsletter on true murder and mystery in Alaska, and listen to her podcast Murder and Mystery in the Last Frontier.
