SKELLIG MICHAEL’S population of tiny puffins are seasoned and seasonal transatlantic travellers, according to research by scientists at University College Cork.
The fragile birds fly several thousand miles to Canada, the east coast of the US, and to Greenland from Kerry every autumn, returning the following spring.
Although puffins have been tracked from sites in Scotland and Wales, this Irish study is the first to show them making it across the Atlantic.
“They certainly breed them tough in Kerry,” Dr Michelle Cronin and Dr Mark Jessopp of UCC’s coastal and marine research centre have noted.
They tracked the movements of several dozen of Skellig’s birds for their research, attaching light geolocator tags that work on sunrise and sunset times to give a latitude and longitude.
“We tagged 27 birds and got 10 tagged birds back,” Dr Cronin says. The tags were attached for almost a year, and the data collected and downloaded gave a “fascinating insight” into the birds’ movements, she says.
The Skelligs rocks and neighbouring Puffin island host an estimated half of this island’s puffin population, which also breeds on Rathlin, the Great Saltee and Lambay islands among a scattering of coastal locations.
Their main diet comprises calorie-rich sand eel and sprat, and they compete for space on the Skelligs from April with shearwaters, petrels, fulmars and kittiwakes – before leaving in late August at the end of the breeding season.
The birds are “nest-faithful”, Dr Cronin explains, as they tend to return to the same burrow each year.
The captured birds with tags were weighed and a feather was taken from each of them before their release. Analysis of the feathers will give insights into their diet, she says.
The scientists believe the motivation for such a long-distance trip each year is a temporary abundance of capelin, a small oil-rich fish on which many seabirds, seals and whales feed. “Once this is depleted, the puffins then turn tail and spend the majority of the winter months in the storm-ravaged seas of the Atlantic ocean, presumably feeding on small fish and zooplankton,” Dr Cronin says.
The arduous nature of the annual migration may explain why the Kerry population of puffins is doing far better than counterparts in Britain, she says.
Birdwatch Ireland expressed alarm earlier this year about the fact that rats preying on chicks and eggs are threatening puffin populations here.
Puffins are on the amber endangered species list for Ireland.
The UCC scientists are planning further work under the Beaufort Marine Research Awards. This may yield important information on “the health of our oceans”, Dr Cronin says.
