Climate change is causing mass 'die-offs' in seabirds such as puffins

International News

Changes in seabird numbers are probably the best way to monitor the quality of the marine environment. And things are looking bad. In the past 50 years, the world population of marine birds has more than halved. What’s worse is that few people have noticed.
Puffins, guillemots, penguins and albatrosses are all in decline. How do we know this? There are three main ways of checking on numbers. First and best are long-term population studies: counts of individuals or pairs at their breeding colonies made in a systematic, rigorous way each year at established “study plots”. For instance, I have studied the same population of guillemots on Skomer Island in Wales since 1972. Consistent, careful methodology is the key here, but it is labour intensive.
Second, are one-off counts made every ten years or so over larger areas. This has occurred in the UK, starting with the census known as “Operation Seafarer” in 1969-70, and with the most recent survey last year. This method provides estimates of the size of the overall population of different species but is less good at detecting small changes in numbers.
The third way is by counting the bodies of seabirds washed up on the shoreline – usually referred to as beached bird surveys. Regular, systematic counts along set lengths of shoreline provide background levels of mortality. Occasionally, numbers spike in what in seabird parlance is known as a “wreck”, as occurred in 2014 when more than 50,000 seabirds, mainly guillemots and puffins, were washed up on the west coast of Britain and France.
Seabird wrecks have been known about for a long time, but they are becoming more common. Wrecked seabirds are usually emaciated,

 having usually starved to death, indicating a catastrophic failure in their food supply.