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By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Photographs and video by JOSH HANER
AUG. 29, 2018
“Wow, science!” she said, and smiled. Ideally, this bird, with its
tuxedo-like black-and-white plumage and clownish orange beak,
would have voided its bowels into a stainless steel bowl she calls
the “puffin toilet.” She took a flat wooden spoon out of its wrapper,
3 Read.
scraped the Watch.
mess upListen. Four-
and placed it in a vial for analysis; she wants
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to know what these birds have been eating.
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Though some puffin colonies are prospering, in Iceland, where the
largest population of Atlantic puffins is found, their numbers have
dropped from roughly seven million individuals to about 5.4
million. Since 2015, the birds have have been
havebeen listed
beenlisted as
listedas “vulnerable”
“vulnerable” by
as“vulnerable”
https://nyti.ms/2LCzCrJ
the International Union for Conservation of Nature, meaning they
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high risk
highrisk of
riskof extinction
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inthe wild
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Hunters with long nets can be seen tooling around Grimsey Island
in the summer, leaving behind piles of bird carcasses, the breast
meat stripped away. Iceland has restricted the annual harvest, but
hunting “is accelerating the decline,” Dr. Hansen said.
After dinner, the two scientists worked into the bright Arctic night,
ultimately catching, examining and releasing a dozen birds in their
two-day stay on this island. Between captures, Dr. Fayet leaned on
a rock, staring intently at a cliff face. Suddenly she leapt up and ran
at startling speed across the uneven soil some 150 feet to the cliff,
crouching in front of the one hole among many that she saw a bird
jet into.
After extracting a bird, they slid it into a plastic tube that oddly
enough kept it calm, and weighed it. Dr. Hansen attached a steel
identifying band to the bird’s leg. Then they removed it from the
tube and attached a tiny GPS tracker to its back, between the
wings, with marine tape.
In the week until the lightweight devices drop off, they show how
far the birds fly for their food and how deep they dive for it. Each
tracker costs more than $800, which means the case containing
them was worth more than the battered truck the researchers were
driving.
Dr. Fayet plucked five feathers for later DNA analysis to determine
the bird’s sex. For identification from afar, she used a marker to put
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a3stroke of blue on its breast and white correction fluid to put a dot
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atop tomorrow.
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and returned the puffin to its burrow, where it will no doubt retell
the story for years to come about its abduction by aliens during the
summer of the tags and tape.
https://nyti.ms/2LCzCrJ
Around Iceland, the puffins have suffered because of the decline of
their favorite food, silvery sand eels, which dangle from the
Climate
parents’ beaks as they bring them to their young. That collapse
correlates to a rise in sea surface temperatures that Dr. Hansen has
been monitoring for years.
Without as many sand eels in the water, the birds have to fly farther
to find food for themselves and their chicks. So the data from the
GPS Read. Watch.
loggers, however Listen. Four-
briefly transmitted, is of great interest. As
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Dr. Fayet sat
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Norway sent the first data from their work the week before, and her
screen filled with looping paths of foraging birds. “Because this is
the first time this is being done, we have no expectations,” she said.
“Everything we get is exciting.”
https://nyti.ms/2LCzCrJ
Even thrilling data can contain a sad message. “Everywhere, they
Climate
are going further than we thought,” she said. The colonies’ decline
suggests these birds are working too hard for their supper. “Flying,
for puffins, is very demanding,” she said. “It is a big energy cost
for them.”
When the adults can’t catch enough to feed themselves and the
chicks, they make an instinctive Malthusian choice; the chicks
starve. Dr. Fayet called her quest “heartbreaking”: “You put your
hand in the burrow and feel with your hand a little ball on the floor,
but then you realize it’s cold, and not moving.”