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Seabirds spend approximately 75% of the year at sea, only coming to land to nest during the summer breeding season. This makes understanding their marine habitat selection, particularly during the non-breeding season, challenging. Tufted puffins are distributed along the west coast of North America, Alaska, and the Russian Far East. Populations have historically been stable in Alaska; however, new research indicates that these populations are now declining.
To understand the unknown migration routes and wintering areas of tufted puffins, researchers at Prince William Sound Science Center and University of Alaska Fairbanks deployed small, archival light-level geolocators on adults breeding on Middleton Island, a small Island in the Gulf of Alaska that hosts approximately 20,000 tufted puffins during the summer months. Results from the study revealed that male and female tufted puffins were short-distance migrants, wintering in the deep offshore waters of the eastern Gulf of Alaska and in the adjacent Northeast Pacific Ocean. Adult puffins departed the breeding grounds in early September and arrived to wintering areas in October, with males arriving earlier than females. Puffin distributions tended to shift southwards throughout the fall and winter season extending to approximately the northern end of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. In spring, puffins left their wintering areas in mid-March and arrived back to the Middleton Island area by early May.
This study provides valuable information on the non-breeding movements and distribution of tufted puffins, which can be used to inform risk assessments for the species including vulnerability to temporally and spatially explicit marine pollution, disease, fisheries by-catch, and ocean-climate variability.
Click here to learn more about the project and results, and read the peer-reviewed paper that was recently published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
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