OK, we're right at five o'clock, and I see there are still several folks joining.
[Chris] So, I'm just gonna put up our,
a first cover slide and maybe give folks one more minute,
if that's OK with you, Scott?
We are now at 5:01, so I'm ready to get this show on the
road, if you will.
So welcome, everyone.
We're pleased to have you join us this evening.
We're pleased to have you join us for Tufted Puffin Natural History
Research and Conservation Status . And we're using the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries
Webinar Series Platform.
I would like to start with an acknowledgement that we are broadcasting from the traditional
lands of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe and near the site of their historical village
Tse-whit-zen (ch-WHEET-son).
The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe is a sovereign, federally-recognized Indian Nation, with its
own constitution and government.
The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe resides in the Lower Elwha River Valley and adjacent bluffs
on the north coast of the Olympic Peninsula,
just west of Port Angeles, Washington.
The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has lived in this area since time immemorial.
And today, tribal lands include about a thousand
acres of land on or near the Elwha River where they
continue to be active in stewardship that protects, enhances and restores land,
air, and water resources and environmental health for generations to come.
And I hope you'll join me in supporting their efforts and successes to meet these goals.
So, I'm Chris Butler Minor.
I'm the Community Engagement Specialist for Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.
And I'll be facilitating today's webinar.
Also joining us is Rachele Brown, Education Manager with Feiro Marine Life Center.
This event is co-hosted by Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary and Feiro Marine
Life Center as the second installment of our 2023 Speaker Series.
And the speaker series brings you marine focused topics of interest from subject matter experts.
Just a little housekeeping, if you will, during the presentation, all attendees will be in
listen only mode and, but we'll have time
to answer questions at the end of the presentation.
But you are welcome to tw...
Excuse me, to type your questions into the question box, in the bottom of the control
panel, which is generally on the right-hand side of your screen.
You can also use that question box to let us know if you're having any technical issues,
and we'll be monitoring the questions and technical issues, and we'll respond to them
as quickly as we can.
We are recording this session and will share the recording with registered participants
via e-mail, and it will also be posted on the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries
website along with closed captioning.
Also, after the session, we would really appreciate
any feedback that you might have for us, that
will help improve the experience.
So please, take a few moments to complete the short evaluation that will be presented
to you after this presentation.
Or, I should say, actually, after Scott's presentation.
So, really quickly, for those of you that are not familiar with the sanctuary system,
I'd like to introduce it to you.
Over 50 years ago, the US ushered in a new era of marine and ocean conservation by creating
the National Marine Sanctuary System.
Now the Office of National Marine Sanctuary serves as Trustee for a network of underwater
areas encompassing more than 620,000 square miles of marine and Great Lakes waters.
So that's pretty close to the size of Alaska.
Now, as you can see from the map, sanctuaries are located all around the US
shorelines and coasts.
The sanctuary, I work for Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, is located along the outer coast
of Washington State.
And it's within the usual and accustomed fishing and hunting areas of the Hoh Tribe, Makah
Tribe, Quileute Tribe, and the Quinault Indian nation.
I also want to share a little bit information with you about Olympic Coast National Marine
Sanctuary.
As I mentioned, it's located off the outer coast of Washington state.
And you can see kind of the reddish boundary.
It starts from just west of Neah Bay in the north, and goes all the way down to the mouth
of the Copalis River in the south and extends 45 to 25 miles
seaward.
Most of the sanctuary lies on Washington's broad continental shelf in waters less
than 200 meters, but it also includes, parts of deep submarine canyons that can reach depths
of more than 1,500 meters, or about 5,000 feet.
The sanctuary covers an area that's more than twice the size of Olympic National Park, and
it's approximately 1.7 times larger than Puget Sound.
It was established in 1994, because it's home to one of North America's most productive
marine ecoregions.
Sanctuary protects excuse me, a productive upwelling zone that's
a seasonal host or is home to marine mammals and seabirds.
And along its shores are thriving kelp and intertidal communities, teeming with fishes
and other sea life. In the darkness of the sea floor, scattered communities of deep-sea
corals and sponges form habitats for fish and other important marine wildlife.
Also, because of the significant natural and cultural resources found along this spectacular,
largely undeveloped shoreline, which represents some of the last remaining wilderness coastline
in the lower 48 states.
Now, I'd like to hand the mic over to Rachele for an introduction to Feiro Marine Life Center.
Rachele?
[Rachele] Thank you, Chris, and thank you everyone for joining us this evening.
I'm Rachele.
I'm the Education Manager with Feiro Marine Life Center and I'm going to keep it really brief.
But Feiro is a community aquarium, located in Port Angeles.
We were founded in 1981 by a community leader and educator, Arthur D. Feiro, and we specialize
in local fish and marine invertebrates.
It's also my pleasure tonight to introduce our presenter, Scott Pearson.
Dr. Scott Pearson is a Senior Research Scientist at Washington Department of Fish
and Wildlife.
He received his PhD from the University of Washington and Bachelors and Masters of Science
from the University of Michigan.
His recent research is focused on assessing wildlife population status and trends and
the underlying mechanisms driving declines to help inform conservation.
His recent work is focused on gathering a better understanding of marine birds and mammals
diet, habitat use, and quality and the effectiveness
of conservation efforts with a focus on
several species of conservation concern.
Scott also supervises the West Side Research Team for the wildlife program.
Without further ado, I give you Dr Scott Pearson.
[Scott] Thank you, Rachele.
Well, thank you.
Today I'll be presenting Tufted Puffin Natural History, Research and Conservation
Status.
The outline of my talk: I'll introduce Washington's
marine environment.
I'll start in the Salish Sea and then I'll move into that coastal environment we were
just talking about - the large marine ecosystem.
Then I'll talk a bit about what is a puffin, move into history about the Tufted puffin,
and a little bit about the research we're doing.
Finally get into habitats,
starting with introducing you to the marine environment that I mostly
work in. I work in both the Salish sea and the outer
coast of Washington.
The Salish Sea includes the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Strait of Georgia in Puget Sound. In
this inner marine waters of Washington,
we know this is, for those of us who live here and visit it, and know this is a pretty
highly urbanized area with large cities like Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, et cetera.
And as a result, much of the shoreline in certain areas is developed.
But there still are portions of the shoreline in the Salish Sea. which are remote.
And there are two islands in particular within the Salish Sea I want to focus on, and they're
really the islands that are the most important to seabirds.
One is Protection Island, which is just off Discovery Bay, very close to Sequim, east
from Port Angeles, and the other one, I mean Port Townsend.
And then, the other one is Smith Island. And Smith Island that's found off of Whidbey Island
and south of the San Juan archipelago.
And, arguably, these are the two most important seabird islands within the entire Salish Sea,
both the US and Canadian.
And that's if you measure importance by the total number of seabirds using them.
We have thousands of seabirds using both islands.
Both islands are largely managed by US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Here's a view of Smith Island, and you can see there's these coastal lots.
You can see Mount Baker in the background. And the puffins
use the upper rim of this island.
This is Protection Island.
Protection is much larger.
It's actually nearly two miles long and nearly three quarters of a mile wide.
And as I mentioned, both islands are managed primarily by the Washington Maritime National
Wildlife Refuge Complex, out of the Sequim area and,
it's the part of, Protection is also managed
by Washington Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. Plus there's one private lease holding.
These islands are important to a variety of sea birds.
One of the most notable is the Rhinoceros auklet, which you see in the foreground.
And when you get on the island and walk up on the slopes and looking towards Discovery Bay
on the Olympic Peninsula,
you get a view like this.
And if I turn and look into the slope, I see all of these burrows.
These burrows were dug into that slope by a species known as the Rhinoceros Auklet, which
you see pictured here. They only come to the island at night, and they come after sunset.
And they are coming throughout the night.
And a lot of activity, up until around four in the morning.
So, when you look at the slope on Protection Island we see it riddled with holes in
those holes or burrows that were dug by the Rhinoceros auklet. And the Rhinoceros auklet is
pictured here, and its named because of this bumped on its beak.
And they have a very wide beak.
And they're, actually a puffin.
I'll talk more about that in a minute.
And they visit the island where they carry their fish crosswise and their beak and to
deliver to their chicks inside the burrows.
In addition to
the Rhinoceros auklet, there are a couple of different species of cormorants on these
islands, including double-crested and pelagic cormorants.
Also, on the shores, you find the eggs and nests of the black oystercatcher. And this is
a species you only find on these more, these uninhabited islands.
They do visit areas that are inhabited, but they don't do well in those environments.
Because if you imagine that nest on a beach where people are walking and have dogs, they're
very likely to have those nests get crushed.
People would in their animals who are disturbed the birds and flush them away.
Incubation would be poor, and also, they're more likely to have their, both their chicks
and eggs, depredated by things like crows, gulls, and other species.
So, they tend to be on these refuge complex, and they do very well there.
So, as we leave the inner marine waters and move to the outer coast of Washington, out
to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and arrive at Cape Flattery, the land that is part of
the Makah Tribal land.
And we look out towards the ocean, we see Tattoosh Island - a very important island
to the Makah Tribe, belongs to the Makah Tribe, but also an important seabird colony.
As we go down the coast, we will find one colony after another, after another.
These colonies on the outer coast face a very different environment than the inner marine
waters do.
This is a very harsh environment, particularly in the fall, throughout the winter.
Where we can have very severe coastal storms. Those storms can result in over 30-foot combined
seas, 80 to 90 mile-an-hour winds hitting these islands can cause significant erosion
if the plant community is disturbed.
And most people, when they think about the coast of the Pacific Northwest, they think of
views like this from Oregon.
They often think of views like this from Oregon because it's a very accessible coastline.
It has a highway running right down it.
It has a lot of state parks that you can access. It has areas like Cannon Beach just to the
south and
you're looking here towards Haystack Rock, which is also an important Tufted puffins
nesting colony.
In Washington, in contrast, it's not a very accessible coast, but it's just this beautiful
or even more spectacular! It has as many offshore rocks and islands, and just a beautiful place.
And one of the reasons it's not as accessible, we don't have a coastal highway.
We have both national parkland.
We have private land. We have tribal land.
And all of that affects one's ability to access the coast. The people who know the coast best
usually go in boats or multi-day backpacking trips along the coast.
But it's a fairly, really a special place.
These offshore rocks and islands are really ideal, nesting habitat are a variety of sea
birds and they're also used by a variety of marine mammals.
When you get onto these offshore rocks and islands, you find that the intertidal community,
it's absolutely spectacular. You find anemones, like you see here.
You see the sea stars, that pisaster, sea stars.
These were nearly disappeared from the island where I took this picture.
I should point out that most of the pictures I'm showing I have taken.
A few are taken by other people, and I tried to make sure I attributed those appropriately.
Um, the piaster on Destruction almost completely disappeared as a result of sea star wasting
disease, and the numbers have been increasing just dramatically.
Now, we're seeing a lot of both the bright orange ones like you see here, as well as
the purple one.
You see in the inter tidal areas, you see sea otters.
This species was extirpated from the state of Washington.
The state of Washington, working with the US Fish and Wildlife Service ended that and
local tribes introduced them, re-introduced them back to Washington.
And their numbers are now doing very well.
You see a variety of pinnipeds species.
These are seals and sea lions here.
We see Steller Sea Lions on Caroll Rock.
You can see the male in the background, two females, and their pups.
This is one of the few spots in Washington where Stellers actually pup.
The islands and rocks are also used by migratory species, like the Ruddy turnstone.
You see here and also its cousin, the Black turnstone.
Species that use it when they're done breeding.
So, they move up north when they're finished breeding, like the Brown Pelican and Heermann's
gulls.
And they'd come up here to do things like molt and put weight on.
If you look at this bird, you can see it's in active molt. Notice how uneven the edge
of the feathers are, how it has gaps in others.
This bird's in the process of replacing most of its primary feathers.
And that's metabic, metabolically very costly to the bird.
It can increase its metabolism by as much as 50, 50% to replace all those feathers.
So, they come to great areas, areas with good forage,
and they feed in this area.
We also see species like the Harlequin duck.
They breed inland and then come back to the coast. And this bird is actively molting,
as well.
Young birds come to spend time on the coast, like this young gull.
And this particular species takes four years to mature, and so it's actively foraging along
the coast, eating a crab dinner like you see here.
You see species like the Pigeon guillemot, signing in the rain on Destruction Island.
and, of course, you see the black oystercatcher, which I introduced you to earlier.
You see Brant's cormorants, like you see here, double-crested and pelagic cormorants. You see
Common murres on the slopes of Tattoosh Island.
Here we are on up on Tattoosh, looking at the cliff face it and you can see hundreds
of Common murres on those ledges where they have a single egg.
Here's a Common murre on the water, just off shore of Tattoosh.
Then, when you leave that intertidal, local, sort of nearshore environment, then move
into the offshore environment which the puffin also uses.
And you start to look around you.
You see in the nearshore environment things like the Rhinoceros auklet which I already
introduced you to, and the Common murre and eventually, you end out in the deep blue
water.
This is where the continental shelf drops off.
The water literally does become blue and this is where we see species like the Laysan albatross.
And the Black Footed albatross.
There's a Black Footed albatross eating a rockfish.
You see a variety of shearwaters soaring just above the water, like the Sooty shearwater
Short-tailed shearwater, pink-footed shearwater, Manx Shearwater, et cetera.
Then if you're lucky, you'll see Blue sharks on a calm day.
You see their feathers, or sorry, their dorsal fin just breaking the water.
And if you're extremely lucky, you've essentially won the lottery, you see Leatherback Sea turtles,
like I saw one day on the outer coast.
This is about 30 miles off shore.
And you see species like the fur seals the Northern fur seal, and its cousin, the
Guadalupe fur seal; a variety of whales, the most common being the gray and the humpback,
which you see pictured here.
A number of dolphins and porpoises. Here's the White-sided dolphin riding our bow wave.
Then out there, particularly during the non-breeding
season, very far off shore, you'll find the
Tufted puffin.
The Tufted puffins says it spends the vast majority of its life at sea.
And it's a very different looking species during the winter, during the non-breeding
season. So seven months of the year.
It looks like this.
Notice how the white face patches mostly gone, the tufts are gone.
It's lost that upper plate on its beak - its gone.
And all of that will come back the next spring.
And I took this picture this last, I think, October about 30 miles offshore.
So that introduced you to kind of got you warmed up for where the puffin lives and spends
its time.
Let's talk just a little bit about, what is a puffin.
When we talk about puffins (I'm not sure - it's too bad, this Tufted puffin wasn't supposed
to come in yet, but it did.)
We create these trees based on genetic information and this tree is a rooted tree.
It's been rooted by two species at the very bottom, which are not related to all the others.
They help route the tree.
And then we look at patterns of ancestry and descent.
And that's what you're seeing above.
And all of those individuals, they're all related to each other.
They're all in one family, and we call that family the Alcidae.
And that family, we call the Alcids. That
family includes the dovekie, the razorbill, the common
murre, the murrelets, the guillemots, the auklets, and then
the puffins are all the way down at the bottom.
And the most basal member of that group at the very bottom if you look, the first one
branching off is the Rhinoceros auklet.
So, when I mentioned earlier that it's actually a puffin, it is. It's not an auklet. It's poorly
named.
It's a puffin.
And so, it's the basal member of all the other puffins.
And from that comes the Tufted
Puffins as you see in Peter's picture above.
And then you have coming two sister species.
One is the Atlantic puffin, which seems to be the puffin that everybody knows and loves
and it ends up on cereal boxes.
Then, then there's the Horned puffin, which is found primarily just north of where I am.
It breeds on Vancouver Island, all the way up through Alaska.
But we get them regularly in our waters, particularly
in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, in the Northern
Coast.
There's been a 1 or 2 hanging out recently. This individual, I took off, a picture I shot
this picture, in Washington. This individual was going in and out of burrows in Washington
and hanging out with other tufted puffins.
It wasn't actively breeding.
But it makes me wonder if it isn't prospecting and thinking about bringing locally.
All right, now you know a bit about what is a puffin.
Let's move into a bit about the natural history of the tufted puffins. And let me start by
introducing you to where the bird is found. And the breeding range is sort of this coral
or brownish color.
It is not the best one to ask about colors.
I don't see color the same way everyone else does.
But you can see that, where you have this brownish or coral color, that's breeding range.
And it breeds from Japan, all the way up through Alaska all the way through Russia, through
the Aleutian Islands, up into the Bering Sea, through the Gulf of Alaska, to the panhandle
of Alaska, off the coast of British Columbia, down to Washington, Oregon, and all the way
down to the Farallon Islands in California.
And it spends its non-breeding season out here in the blue.
We really don't have a lot of information about where it spends it's non-breeding season.
And fortunately, there's a graduate student working in the Gulf of Alaska, and she has
marked some individuals, and we're starting to learn where they spend their winter.
And we have some new tracking information spending/showing that the birds in the Gulf
of Alaska are hanging out kind of in this area in the middle of the winter.
And this again, is what they looked like during the winter.
And this is that same individual a different picture of that same individual I showed you
earlier, which I took in October.
And then this is what an individual looks like during the breeding season.
So where are they found in Washington? In Washington,
they're found on those two islands I mentioned in the Salish Sea.
They're found on both Smith and Protection Islands.
Then also from Cape Flattery all the way down to Point Grenville.
That rocky coastline, I showed you pictures of.
They breed on the islands like this one.
This is Carroll Island. And it's hard to get a feel for size.
Steve took this out of the airplane when he was doing pinniped counts, and it's hard
to tell, but I don't know if you can see my cursor,
but there are, [Chris] Yes, we can. [Scott] Oh, good, there's a
group of Steller Sea Lions right here, which you can barely see, there are little dots.
And Steller Sea Lions can weigh up to 2,000 pounds and it can be 12 feet
going from one tip of one flipper to the other.
And they're dots on here - very small.
So, it gives you a feel for how big this island actually is.
And the Tufted puffins are mostly up here, in this, on this side of the island.
They're also found on Islands, like this one, Alexander.
Here, I'm up on the slope of Alexander in this beautiful, native, luxuriant tufted hair
grass.
At the base of each one of these tufts, and this is what the this is what a natural island
should look like if it hasn't been disturbed with a lot of non-native vegetation,
you'll notice that all these little clumps of grass here, at the base of each one of these
clumps is a variety of holes and those holes include Cassin's auklets, and
Storm petrels and behind me are the Tufted puffins.
So where are they, when they're here locally?
Well, we can use at sea data to find out where they spend their time.
So, here's a bunch of surveys we've done at sea that we have done, and then a bunch of
cruises that NOAA has done.
And we combined all of that data to predict/ create these predicted density surfaces.
And we can see these hotspots, the red areas are where we expect to see higher densities of
puffins and the cold spots,
and blue is where we expect to see fewer.
And notice that their are all around the colonies along the coastline.
And they're even the really small colonies that we know about, actually light up in yellow.
So down here by Aaron and Aaron's Bride, that's a very small colony that shows up in yellow.
So, they spend time near the colony, but they also go way out here into the shelf break
where they forage.
And when they're on the colony, they're nesting in burrows just like the Rhinoceros auklet.
So, they dig that with their beaks carving into that dirt, and then pushing it out that
dirt out with their sharp claws on their feet.
They will also nest and crevices, which you see, I, I stole this picture from the
Internet, as I labeled it.
I don't know exactly where this picture was taken, but crevice nesting occurs in a few
places that occurs down in the Farallon Islands down in California.
It also occurs way up in the Bering Sea up in Alaska. Throughout the vast majority of
the puffin's range, though, it digs burrows like you see here.
The pair bond is associated with that burrow.
So, they're often separated from each other throughout the winter.
They'll come back together to that same burrow.
They'll lay a single egg. And usually they don't start laying eggs until they're about
four years of age.
They lay only one egg per year.
They incubate that egg taking turns, in 24-hour shifts
for about 40 some days. They then, that egg will hatch, hopefully, and then they'll take
care of that chick for another month or so. And then eventually, it will fledge - it will go
out to sea and be independent at that stage.
When you're on a colony and you look off on the outer shore, you see individuals' floating
on the water, like, this, this bird at Smith Island.
Then, last summer, I was lucky enough to go out into the Aleutian Islands, and you can
see, just off of the colonies, you will see birds hanging out in the water, where they're
bathing, and they're preening, they're often hanging
out on the water, when they've already delivered
food to their chicks, or they're just resting.
Then there are also birds flying in the air. This is a picture I took of a bird off right
off of Destruction Island.
Then if you go to big colonies like those in Alaska, it looks more like this, where you'll
see clouds in the sky and many puffins on shore.
You can look closely and see all of these puffins, sort of, lined up on the shore,
and they have their burrows in those, in that really dense grass.
Then moving back to Destruction, here's a picture of a, a pair of birds.
This, you can see if you look carefully, you'll see one bird through the legs of the other.
And one is down in its burrow and the other one
is in the process of coming out. This pair didn't breed this year.
In this particular year, in the year I took this picture.
They were actively digging this nest or the burrow.
And this was happening in late July and August.
So, I knew they weren't breeding.
But when they come out of the burrow, sometimes their tufts are kind of dirty and their
beaks are dirty.
But eventually, they clean themselves off.
Here's a bird on Jagat Island that I took a shot of.
This bird had just come out of the burrow and dropped a very large rock out of the burrow.
Then when they're done building their burrows or using another burrow that's no longer occupied,
they sometimes bring in nesting material.
They don't form a cup like most birds, and some birds don't really use any nesting material
at all.
It seems to be somewhat unpredictable.
This is the only bird I've ever seen
bring in seagrass to line its burrow.
Other puffins I've seen use just grass that's adjacent to them -
the burrow on the island.
On the island surface, you will see birds stretching their wings and preening.
You'll see a lot of social interaction.
The birds will come together and you see the two birds with the beak spread wide open.
It seems to be a pair formation activity that we're seeing there.
It's not aggressive.
They will then come together and they'll do
what we call bill claps, where they'll clap their beaks
together back and forth and back and forth.
One bird's just looking on. The other two are clapping their beaks.
Sometimes in that clapping, you'll see them sort of nibble at the base of each other's
beak.
It seems almost intimate if you were to put human terms on it.
Then they do what I technically call the silly clown walk where they do this exaggerated
walk putting one foot out in front of the other and sort of wobbling back and forth
together.
So that's a little bit of feeling for what it's like to be on a puffin colony.
And now, let me just introduce you to a little bit of the research we're doing.
And there's a lot of work going on throughout the puffins' range. A lot of work around in
British Columbia and Alaska right now, as well as work all the way down through Oregon
and California.
So, I'm just going to give you a couple of examples of things that we're doing.
And, as we're doing this work on puffins, we're always working with partners.
We have a variety of partners.
I work a lot with the Refuge system - the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
I worked with university partners, both the University of Washington and University of
Puget Sound, NGO's like Oikonos, and then of course,
other government agencies like NOAA.
And a lot of the work we're doing right now is also, in addition to the inner marine water,
colonies were also working on the other coast of Washington on Destruction Island.
This island is about two miles off shore, very close to the mouth of the Hoh River.
This island had an active lighthouse on it that's no longer active.
It's been decommissioned.
I think the lens from this is the Westport Museum.
And there's also an adjacent building, which is the old horn house.
There's a couple other buildings on the island.
They're mostly dilapidated, falling down at the moment.
But the island is very actively used by a variety of sea birds.
And if you put a camera out and you point it at a Tufted puffin burrow, and I'm going
to start in the middle of the night, and just go through a sequence going through the night,
you can see that the birds, remember I mentioned that the Rhinoceros auklet comes into the
colony at night.
So, you see them landing and coming in at night.
And this is pointed at a at a Tufted puffin burrow, not a Rhinoceros auklet burrow,
which are adjacent.
But they're landing on the colony.
And they're all coming together very much like the Tufted puffins, but they're doing
this at nighttime, instead of during the day.
You see a lot of coming together.
And the same thing is going on with beaks with clapping and nibbling at each other's
beaks.
Then you hear the vocalizations - so very
different from
Tufted puffins. Tufted Puffins are generally very quiet.
Not a lot of vocalizations.
Rhinoceros Auckland's, in contrast, are constantly moaning and groaning and giving
up these amazing sounds.
If you put in "BirdNote" and "Rhinoceros auklet" into a Google search, you can hear the sound
recordings that we did on the outer coast or actually in the inner marine waters, on
Protection Island.
And you can hear what they actually sound like.
In addition, we see other things.
We see the non-native rabbit that was introduced by lighthouse keepers back in the late
1960's, early 1970's.
And it's creating serious problems on the island.
And I'll talk more about that in a minute.
Then the puffins there it's actually in its burrow.
And they're really not doing much at night.
They're, they're presumably mostly incubating their eggs or maybe brooding their chick.
And then once the chicks big enough, they'll leave and they won't even be on the colony
much at night.
But at night, they found, I found them to be much more active than I had imagined.
They're going in and out of their burrow.
They're not flying away, but they come out and stretch and they go back into their burrow.
And as we, there are other ways we can study them.
We can use these fiber optic burrow probes that Eric Wagner's holding here. And Eric's going
to come talk to you all soon.
And here he's taking this fiber optic burrow probe into a Rhinoceros auklet burrow.
And so, it's got an infrared light on the front and he's got a gaming visor over his
eyes.
And you can see what the camera is seeing deepen the burrow.
And he's going in a meter, sometimes two meters or more into a burrow to see whether or not
it's occupied.
And so, is it occupied by an adult?
Does it have a chick?
Does it have an egg?
Um, and these Rhinoceros auklet burrows, in particular are very complex.
They go in and they bifurcate and sometimes they bifurcate again.
So that keeps splitting.
And you have to check all those different chambers to see if it's being used.
Tufted puffin, in our experience.
on the Washington coast,
those burrows tend to be much simpler, much straighter, and much shorter.
Because the Tufted puffins are much more sensitive to human activities
we often do all of our work early on from far away from the colony. So we'll be observing
them.
We create photos of the colony, we map the burrows onto those photos, and then we can
look at who's going in and out of which burrows.
And are they're feeding they're young?
And based on that information, we can learn about how many of the burrows are occupied.
How many of them appear to have eggs that hatch?
We can tell that because the adults are flying with food, they're carrying in fish.
And how many of those then stay?
Do we see provisioning for long enough where those chicks should be big enough to fledge?
We also want to learn about diet to understand whether or not diet's limiting to these birds.
With species like Rhinoceros auklets,
we can actually startle them at night and scare them and cause them to drop their beak load,
like, this bird here, has a bill load of sandlance.
And fortunately, Rhinoceros auklets are very tolerant
of this kind of disturbance.
We've never seen any evidence of abandonment, as a result of this activity.
We also do it in a way where we space it out and do it in different places so that we don't
cause more than one disturbance in one night, per year.
And the chicks seemed to do fine,
fortunately. Fortunately, both adults bring back a bill load each night. Hopefully,
we end up stealing just one bill load from one adult. Then we can measure that and
look at what that bill load out is composed of.
So, here's a single bill load.
We can measure it.
And you can see they're mostly sandlance.
That's all the fish on the left and a couple of salmon.
Salmon, I should point out, even though you saw in that picture, are extremely rare in
the diet.
So, that's kind of an unusual bill load and probably why we took a picture of it.
For Tufted puffins, we end up spending more time, Here's Peter Hodum. He's a professor at the
University of Puget Sound.
We spend more time looking at them from a distance. And one of his students worked with
us.
And what we did is we use photographs to document what the birds were eating.
So rather than go on the colony and disturb them, we did it from afar, and remember they're
coming back to the colony during the day and not at night.
And so, we can if we have a high-end digital SLR (single lens reflex) or a mirrorless camera,
with a nice lens, we can get good shots.
And we can look at how many fish are in that bill load.
This is actually a bird from Alaska, which I took this past summer.
Here's a bird on Destruction Island.
Sometimes they're carrying lots of fish, sometimes only bringing back one fish.
Sometimes they have embryonic fish or larval fish like you see here.
You can see how you can see through the fish?
These are very young fish.
And as a result, usually we can't tell what species they are. And then we can analyze
those pictures.
And we can also look at the length of the fish relative to the bill size to determine
how long those fish probably are.
And so, we can look at the composition of
that food that they're bringing back. Is it flatfish?
Is it herring? Is it sandlance?
Squid? Is it smelt?
Larval fish or other things that we can't identify?
We can look at the average fish length.
Remember comparing that to the bill length, when we know what the average width
and average length of the of the bill is. We can also look at the number of fish per bill load.
and how that changes, in each year.
Then, we also do research in partnership, as I mentioned, and sometimes we're just providing
samples to others.
So, right now, Teresa Berg at the University of Lethbridge in Canada has been collecting
samples throughout the range.
And so, we've all been working with her to
determine whether or not there's genetic structure,
determine whether there are distinct subpopulations
and how much gene flow exist amongst them.
So, are individuals moving from the California current to the Alaska current, for example?
So, she'll be answering those kinds of questions.
And to date, we've provided her with over 580 samples from 15 sites, and she using three
different techniques to look at the genetic structure question using mitochondrial DNA,
all the way up to whole genome sequencing.
So now, just a minute to discuss conservation status of the puffin, and then I'll close
out. So years ago, I was asked, should we list the Tufted puffins under the state's Endangered
Species Act?
We happen to have one in Washington.
Some states have one.
Some states don't.
We do.
And I said, Well, we don't really have any good quantitative information.
And I said, why don't we go out and assess its status?
The first thing we did is we revisited all the historically occupied sites and sites
that could potentially have habitat for Tufted puffins.
And there was good, some good historical data, particularly from the refuges.
And so, we could go back and revisit those sites.
And we did repeated visits to those sites over a couple of years.
And we found that we, I was worried that if it was just a few puffins on a on a rock,
would we miss them?
And fortunately, we have a very high detection rate.
And what we found was essentially all of the puffins were lost from the Salish Sea.
A similar work has occurred up in British Columbia, and so that we know there are no
other active colonies on the British Columbia side of the Salish Sea.
The last two remaining in the Salish Sea are Smith Island and Protection. And right now
on Protection, we only have a couple of pairs left.
So, we're down to the last few in the Salish Sea.
Smith, fortunately, has more. And then on the outer coast, we've lost nearly half of
them out there, as well.
So we've lost majority of the of the colonies in the
inner marine waters lost nearly half on the
outer coast.
How are they doing throughout the entire range, was the next question. And I was contracted
to look at that question.
And I assembled 11 datasets, both colony data, as well as at sea data, that expanded 112
years of information, going all the way from the tip of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska,
all the way down to the Farallon Islands in California.
And our results: we found in the California Current
(So that's, you know, Oregon, Washington, and California, going up into the southern BC)
Found populations look like this, where they're just going down over time.
And Washington population, which we see in this image, has gone from tens of thousands
of birds, have just a few thousand remaining.
So, not only are we lost the majority of our colonies or about half of them.
We've also lost a very large portion of our
population. And in Oregon it's even more dramatic, the decline
based on some work that Sean Stephenson has been doing down there.
So, how about to the north? In British Columbia, all the way through the Gulf of Alaska, appears
that those colonies are also declining.
And there are a lot of birds in the Gulf of Alaska.
So, the evidence suggests they're declining. And more recent analyses that were just
done by some other partners;
Actually, with USGS and NOAA, suggests even more
dramatic declines in the Gulf of Alaska than I found.
So, all of this is pointing to large decline throughout the vast majority of the range.
So now, we're stuck with sort of the Aleutian Islands in areas to the north.
And fortunately, in the
Aleutian Islands,
three of these colonies were stable and, sorry, were increasing the smaller one.
And the biggest one in the world was stable.
So, fortunately, those sort in the core of the population appear to be doing OK.
And we realized, as we did this work that we wanted to be able to determine the status
of the species, and not have to sort of cobbled together all these different datasets.
And so right now, we're working on developing a range-wide monitoring strategy for the Tufted
puffins all the way from California, all the way up to Alaska.
And what happened was we ended up with some funding from US Fish and Wildlife Service,
and that went to the University of Washington. We ended out working with Sara Converse in her
lab.
And ended up hiring Lisanne Petracca as a postdoc
who started this work.
And fortunately, for her, unfortunately, for us, she was hired away as a faculty member
in Texas.
But we now have another postdoc working on this, and we will continue this work. And
our goal is to identify and evaluate possible range-wide monitoring strategies based on
performance and cost.
And this past year, and the Aleutian Islands, you can see us here looking at different frames
and different monitoring strategies to try to get insights and how we might do that work.
So, once we end up with some range-wide strategy or monitoring will end up with better data
on how they're doing. Well, in Washington, we knew they were doing badly.
We ended up listing them as endangered.
We did that, I think, back in 2015 and that that listing package is available on our website
and I think it's being provided to you, that link.
Then, we also came up with a statewide recovery plan for the Tufted puffin, which you see
here.
And it also did a periodic status review.
So, how is it doing since we listed it?
And this was a really interesting project,
because it was our first public private partnership
where we worked with the SeaDoc Society.
And Thor Hanson was hired by Joe Gaydos at the SeaDoc Society, and he ended up working with
us to write this document.
So, it ended up working out really well.
It was a great partnership.
And through that process, we looked at what
are the factors input affecting puffin populations.
And we found that climate change appears to be the biggie and the associated effects of
climate change - warming up the ocean and affecting
the food availability.
And there are other factors as well.
And that can be things such as predation from other birds, like bald eagles and owls on
island.
Human disturbance is a biggie, particularly the inner marine water.
Introduced plants and animals like the rabbit I talked about a minute ago, and I'll talk
more about in a second.
We're also concerned about chemical contamination. Some work that I've done that we've done with
Tom Good at NOAA suggests that our puffins: Rhinoceros auklets and Tufted puffins are
experiencing high contaminant loads.
And actually, a carcass that we found of a Tufted puffin and a paper we published, indicates
that it's probably one of the most contaminated animals in the region - actually more contaminated
than the killer whales.
So, as I mentioned though, the of thing that we're most worried about though is climate
change. And climate change and associated change and sea surface temperature is a biggie.
This is a really complex graph is put together by COASST.
COASST is a non-profit organization based
out of the University of Washington and spearheaded
by Julia Parrish.
And they've been, for many decades, tracking the number of dead birds on beaches;
all the way from California, working with partners all the way through British Columbia,
(different partners there) all the way up to tribal partners up into in Alaska.
And what we can do is look at how, how, how has that mortality in certain years compared
to other years?
And these unusual events, sharp is unusual mortality, we see a lot of mortality compared
to normal and that's what these bubbles show on this timeline.
So, we're going from 2006 to 2020 and the bigger bubbles indicate more death on the
beach and more dead birds. And then, if you notice, a lot of this mortality is occurring
when we see red in these bars below.
And these bars below indicate when the sea surface temperature is warm
in these various locations from the Chukchi Sea all the way down to California.
And so, there is a strong relationship, a correlation between the warming of the ocean
and these mortality events. And some of these events have resulted in killing of millions
of birds.
And I should also point out that the vast, a high percent of these mortality events have
involved birds and the Alcidae,
the Alcid family, which includes puffins.
So, you see the Rhino here, the Tufted puffins,
the Cassin's auklet, Common murre, Common murre, Tufted puffin, Rhinoceros auklet,
Common murre. You see them appearing throughout this slide.
So, what can we do to try to help them? We, we developed a bunch of recovery priorities
locally.
OK, well, monitoring populations doesn't really tell us, doesn't help recovery, but
it helps us understand if we're making progress or if any of our actions are helping.
So, that becomes an important priority.
We want to maintain and have enhanced population, and we want to re-establish colonies, if we
can.
We want to make sure it's enough prey for the species, if we can.
We want to reduce threats and disturbance to the islands, et cetera.
And I'm just gonna talk about a couple of these goals.
And the first one I'll talk about is assessing and managing invasive non-native species at
Tufted Puffins nesting colonies. And the one of the species we're very concerned
about it than non-native Rabbit.
This is a European Rabbit or European hare.
It was introduced by lighthouse keepers and it was introduced to Destruction Island in
the late sixties/early seventies.
And it's persisted since. And rabbits are really good at reproducing as we all know,
well, some are, we actually
have endangered rabbits in Washington.
But the European hare, it seems to be doing just fine on Destruction.
And one thing it's doing, Destruction as I mentioned, is found off shore on the outer
coast of Washington.
Remember, it's about two miles off the Hoh River, had a former lighthouse on it, and
lighthouse keepers and houses on it.
And that's when the rabbits were introduced. And the rabbits change the environment. And
also having people bring in different kinds of plants also influenced the environment.
And what happened was the rabbits started grazing the grasses.
And also, they introduced
annual grasses ended up replacing the perennial grasses. Imagine perennial grasses are deep
rooted, and they hold the soil all winter long with those big storms.
Now you move to annual grasses.
They die in the fall.
They brown up, very shallow rooted, they essentially
go away in the winter and that's when the
storms hit the coast.
And we see this tremendous erosion occurring on Destruction as a result of this grazing
from the rabbits.
We're losing a lot of burrows for Tufted puffins and for Rhinoceros auklets.
I've seen many tens of them being washed into the ocean.
And so, this is the culprit, the European hare.
And in addition, this rabbit is very different from our rabbits on that are native on the
coast.
It developed, it digs warrens or burrows, so it goes into the holes in the ground.
Those holes would have been used by things
like Rhinoceros auklets and Tufted puffins. It changes
the shape, widens them, makes them no longer suitable for Tufted puffins.
And based on work done in other places in Chile on Pink-footed shearwaters, on Atlantic
puffins in Europe founding, we found that removing the rabbits has a really positive
effect on the population and they seem to rebound after that removal of the rabbits.
And you can see in this ex-closure down in the bottom on a very large island in Australia,
where they're removed many, many thousands of rabbits very successively successfully.
And you can see the ex-closure here.
So, you're excluding the rabbits in the in the grassy area.
And you can see what the vegetation would look like in the absence of rabbits.
You can see they just have a profound effect on the environment.
And in Washington, we actually removed rabbits from an island: on Smith Island.
I happened to find this article, was published in 1925, and of all places was in the Miami
Daily News, where I found it.
And it's talking about the use of strychnine gas to kill rabbits on Smith Island.
And the reason they killed the rabbits on Smith Island was because the rabbits were
undermining the lighthouse. So it was not out of necessarily concern about rabbit effect on
other animals,
but out of concern about what it was doing to the lighthouse.
They were successful. Today,
there are no rabbits on that island.
And groups like Island Conservation can be very successful, and they do have been very
successful in places throughout Asia, and south and places, like working in places to
the south.
And also, the refuges in Alaska have been very successful in removing their islands, there.
So, the other thing we can do to try to help puffins, is experiment with the use of social
attraction.
And bringing puffins backed islands that they may not be on, or are trying to encourage
them to nest.
And that this was a very successful project, it was started many years ago by Stephen
Cress. And it was called "Project Puffin" off the coast of Maine.
And they had lost their puffins from their island.
And they ended up doing some predator management.
And after they did the predator management they brought in decoys and created artificial
burrows.
And sure enough, they were able to bring puffins back to their islands.
And so, we're going to experiment with similar decoys and artificial burrows this coming
season just to see if they respond to the decoys like the Atlantic puffin did.
So, I've been jabbering on for quite a while.
I'm going to stop and give you all some opportunities to ask me questions.
Thank you. [Rachele]
Thank you Scott.
I'm gonna jump in really quick with a couple easy questions.
Lily is asking if puffins are sexually mono-morphic.
[Scott] They are by physical appearance.
But if you actually weigh and measure them, the males are larger.
You know, some birds, females are larger, like birds of prey. In seabirds,
lots of sometimes the males are larger.
Puffins are, the males are a fair amount larger, but there hasn't been a lot of work done on
Tufted puffins in terms of
the sex differences in size.
So usually, the beak tends to be bigger, and the weight tends to be greater on the males.
And we certainly find that and Rhinoceros auklets, where we've done genetic testing
on sex because you can't tell by looking at them.
And then we also did measurements and weighed them, and we find that the males in general
are bigger than the females.
But there's some overlap in the middle where some individual, you couldn't really say whether
they're male or female based on either measuring the beak size or by weight.
[Chris] Oh, interesting.
Somewhat similar question,
did you say that they are monogamous?
[Scott] They are, and they appear to maintain their
social mate.
And the reason we know that is, for most of these puffins, if you mark individuals
and for example, up in Alaska, Katie and her PhD project, she put these units, which
measured daylight on the bands on the leg of the Tufted puffins there in the Gulf of
Alaska.
Those go out and record information out at sea.
And then they come back next season.
And you capture them those birds in the exact same borrow, or where they were previously, and
usually both individuals, the male and the female, are returning to the exact same burrow.
And we found that with Rhinoceros auklet on Protection Island, we've done the same
thing there.
We find the males and females are coming back to the exact same burrow they were in the
previous year.
So, appears that mate bond is formed around the burrow, like many burrow nesting seabirds.
They split up in the winter, but they come back for during the breeding season.
Some other alcids, like Marbled murrelet, which I spent a lot of time working
on, they seem to maintain that pair bond year-round. You find them as pairs throughout
the year.
So, it's a little bit different in that, but they're are more inland.
They're usually in protected waters during the winter.
The Tufted puffin lives out in the ocean.
It might be hard to stay together out there.
[Rachele]
Thank you, when you were talking about the intricate burrows system, with lots of branches
and forks, does only one pair inhabit that burrow?
[Scott] Really good question.
Yes.
The one exception is where you have a really large in large entrance.
So, like what you saw behind that rabbit, that one image, it was a big, big hole, and
that's where it's eroded
or come off the front.
And sometimes by that erosion, it brings two burrows that were separate together, and usually
there is a tunnel going this way and a tunnel going that way.
Nothing going straight back.
And so, this one might be occupied in the left and the right would be occupied.
But in general, if there's a single burrow going in, we don't find another puffin inside
that burrow.
The exception to that is if we're on islands on the outer coast where you have a big burrow,
that's a Tufted puffins burrow.
And so, in the back, there'll be a Tufted Puffins, but off to the side might be a little
chamber, and that small little chamber can have a Storm petrol in it.
So, we do find other species sometimes in the same burrow with the Tufted puffins.
So, if it's a big burrow with a very small little chamber off to the side, you might
find something like a Storm petrel. That's rare, I don't see that very often.
But it does happen occasionally.
[Chris] That's really cool [chuckles].
[Scott] Yeah.
[Chris] So, we have another question asking,
Are the samples blood draws or individuals collected
when you're to do this
genomics?
[Scott] Yeah, they came in all different flavors [chuckles].
So, we tried fecal samples. So that just grab/ going to the mouth of the burrow and getting
fresh fecal samples.
We have done that. That, that very few of the samples that she has are fecal samples.
Did a lot of egg shell collection, so, when the egg hatches, they'll push out that egg
and usually we can get enough genetic information on the eggshell.
The other way we've done is blood draws when we're, when we're actually doing captures
for another reason.
Then if we find any individuals that die on the colony, then we'll actually use that dead
carcass. Then sometimes we'll get individuals that might go into rehab, that are caught locally.
And we might grab a blood sample from that individual.
So, they came in a variety of different flavors, if you will.
There were mostly blood samples,
but also well, a fair number more eggs as well.
But not collecting a whole egg.
So, these are eggs that hatch the chicks inside.
The egg shells get expelled.
We're collecting those egg shell.
One other thing about the genetic study, we Tom, just, at NOAA working with us
has just done some genetic work on the fecal samples to try to reconstruct diet, and we're
finding it's working pretty well.
We're using fecal information to say, OK, what the DNA of its prey should end out in its
feces. And it does, we've been doing that for a lot
of years, for a number of years now, for pinnipeds;
seals and sea lions to reconstruct their diet,
we're now doing that more and more with birds.
Um, so we get that genetic information from the fecal sample.
And that also, not only does it contain the genetic information of the bird that pooped
it, had, that produced the poop, I should say, but it also provides information on frequency
of occurrence of different prey items in that feces.
[Chris] Are there any theories as to what's causing
the population declines in Washington/Oregon?
And they made some suggestions that maybe, is it more climate change, or more development,
or something else?
[Scott] It might be a mixture of different things.
Climate change is definitely, we see a strong signal in terms of its potential effects on,
on puffins and all the alcids. That's definitely a strong fact factor.
And you're down in Washington, we're essentially in the southern end of its range.
So, it's likely to be more affected there, but we're seeing those effects all the way
up through the Gulf of Alaska,
which is pretty amazing.
So that's one factor.
Disturbance is definitely another, particularly locally.
My guess is, it would be very hard for Tufted puffins to persist in place like the San Juan
islands, with so many boats and so many people around, would be a challenging place.
So human activity, and particularly if people go onto the island. We're finding more
and more even though
all of these refuge islands are off limits, that people,
everybody wants to get on them because they're the only people in the world on that island,
which is a wonderful feeling,
I will tell you that. And I take that privilege, I don't take that privilege lightly.
So, whenever we go onto the island, we're trying to have as light of a footprint as
we possibly can.
We stay as short of a period as we can, and we know how to do this in a way where we have
very little impact.
But other people arrive.
For example, sea kayakers now on the outer coast, have been stopping on Destruction.
They set a fire off on the beach during the middle of the breeding season.
All of these birds are coming in at night, and there's a fire there.
And then also have been intentionally set fires on Protection, two years ago. It appears
there was an intentionally set fire there and it burned right up through all of the Rhino
A big part of the Rhinoceros auklet colony and came within 10 meters of the Tufted
puffins' burrow.
So, these activities are not very helpful for puffins.
And then the other thing, I speculate again when we don't know for sure, would be forage
fish and the availability of forage fish.
We see that that forage fish are key to so many things.
They are key to the salmon populations, they' re key to ultimately to killer whales, and they're
key to other things, like tufted puffins.
So, the more we can do to protect the spawning habitat and forage fish, the better off we're
going to be.
[Rachele]
Are you utilizing any Citizen science, when you are talking about observations of puffins
in Washington?
[Scott] We currently are not.
I mean, of course, the beach that the COASST program, that survey
that I showed you how that information can help inform us.
That is a citizen science-based project.
The Islands themselves brings other people. On the Islands we've mostly been working with
students and so it becomes a nice place to help train students and have them work with
us, using undergraduates from University of Puget Sound, working with graduates now at
the University of Washington, and elsewhere.
My priority is to bring students on those islands if we're going to bring any extra
people.
Um.
In Oregon, though, at Haystack rock, citizens actually monitor that rock and monitor the
population.
And so, because that rock is just off the beach and you can look at it from shore,
they've been monitoring the population based on just having volunteers working for the
Refuge system.
And in addition, there's been a Master's project with Rachel Orbin there.
And with Sean Stephenson.
The two of them, working with the graduate student looking at using again, photographs like we're
doing in Washington. Where people who are good at taking pictures are taking pictures of
birds flying in and we get more information on diet at that point.
That's another way of using citizen science.
[Chris] So, given the puffins considerable use of water in the North Pacific Ocean,
do you think there
is recent news about new protections for high seas might benefit tufted populations?
[Scott] The high sea fisheries, I assume that's what they're referring to?
In general, don't seem to have a lot of bycatch.
I sit on the Alaska Longline Groundfish Fishery Advisory Group and go up to Juno regularly
for meetings and look at the bycatch data.
And in general, we're seeing though, that fishery terms of bycatch -
(So, when we're talking about bycatch or you're incidentally catching species, unintended
targets, and sea birds can be a problem.)
but really, the problem there, tends to be mostly what we call our Tube noses.
So, that tends to be your shearwaters and your albatrosses., The Japanese gill net
fishery, which was a high net high seas gill net fishery, was horrible for puffins.
It's literally killing thousands of puffins
per year, many thousands of puffins per year, Tufted puffins.
And fortunately, that fishery was banned, I think back in the 1980s / early 1990s as
I recall.
And so that's no longer a threat.
So right now, I don't see any warning signs that the fishery, the offshore fishery is
the problem.
At least based on the data I've looked at so far.
[Rachele] Thank you.
For our last little batch of questions.
We had a number come in about cheiks.
First is: How old is a puffin before it starts laying eggs?
And then, what do we know about life in the burrow and do the adults take them out
to sea with them?
[Scott] Good question.
Lot there.
So, the starting with
so, the question was, how many, sorry.
What was the length of time, sorry?
Could you repeat the first part of it?
[Rachele] When puffin can/
is mature to lay eggs and then, what is life like in the
burrow?
[Scott] Yeah.
Yeah.
Good question: What's life like in the burrow?
So, the we think that most puffins reach
actual maturity are where they come back to the colony and look, like this puffin here.
When they're about 3 to 4 years of age.
at first season, they may not actually reproduce.
They may do, like that pair I was talking about, where they may see the pair bond form,
and they may actually just go kind of through the routine, but they may not actually reproduce.
So, we think it's around 3 to 4 years of age.
And then they start breeding annually, assuming they are in shape to breed.
And they can live, for as long as over 30 years in captivity.
So, Point Defiance and the Seattle aquarium,
I think Seattle aquarium, had a Rhinoceros auklet that
lived well into its thirties.
So, they can live quite a while. Then, thinking about life in the burrow, the adults
arrive, and then they lay a single egg the female will.
And then, they take, turns, incubating that, and that's they incubate that egg for over
a month.
And then, once that egg hatches, the chick comes out,
they then are feeding it for over a month.
And so, they're provisioning it.
Bringing multiple bill loads of fish during the middle of the day, coming back with bill loads
of fish. And we've seen as many as 4 or 5 deliveries
in a day to a single chick. And that chick
must have been fat and happy.
It ate a lot of fish [chuckles].
I don't know.
And then, in terms of life, in there, it's dark. Because we're going in there with this
burrow probe
and it's fascinating you get in there.
And some of the chicks are, I think they're almost catatonic, because they're just in
this food stupor.
And so, they're just digesting and growing.
And some of them will kind of barely look at the camera and kind of notice it, maybe
sitting there sleeping.
And some of them will actually poke at the camera and they think, I think they might, their
thinking that it might be adult bringing in food.
Some of the rhinos, Rhinoceros auklets, the chicks will actually turn and hide from
you. So they'll actually go to the back of the burrow and you'll just see their fluffy butts
sticking out looking at you.
Are not looking at you.
You will see their rear end pointed at you.
So, they respond differently.
The world in there is dark.
It's actually fascinating.
Some of these Rhinoceros auklets burrows are several meters deep as
I mentioned.
There seems to be a whole community in there. There are these grasshoppers-like insects
that you find on Protection, Island, for example, and they're all on the roof of the
of the chamber and they're living in there.
You see domestic beetles so these are carrion beetles that are going in finding dead chicks
and foraging on them.
You'll see them moving around on the colony, so there's a lot of things going on inside
these burrows.
But mostly the chick's,
it sits in there for many days on end, just waiting mom and dad to come back and feed them.
And when they leave, the thought is they just leave on their own. So that eventually, the
adults are feeding them less and less, chick's get hungry and they are fully feathered, and
they weigh more than, or as much as the adults.
And they'll just fly off to sea.
And they don't go with the adults.
So, it's different than like Common murres or Ancient murrelets, where the chicks will go
off with the adult and stay with the adult for quite some time.
But in this species and Rhinoceros auklets, they probably go out to sea on their own.
[Chris] Cool.
Thank you.
So, one last question.
Where is a good public place to observe and photograph puffins?
[Scott] Yeah, good question.
And it reminds me of kind of a warning I like to give people. I photograph.
And you can tell I enjoy doing it a lot.
And I know what it's like to be a photographer kind of have that bug and want
to get the picture.
It's kind of also like a birder, it's when you're wanting to get checkoff the bird.
But the way I think about it is that I want to do it in a way where I'm going to have
the least amount of impact on that bird.
And so, I, when I feel like I'm starting to impact its behaviors, and you can tell right
away when you are, it's time to back off and move back away.
That's where more
millimeters of lens helps, so that you can be at a safe distance.
You can do cruises out to locations, to photograph them.
There are cruises out of Port Townsend, for example.
And I think most of those tried to do a good job of staying away from them.
I'm hoping that people won't flush them off of the water.
That's really costly to add to alcids. Alcids have very high wing loading.
You think about it when they're going underwater and diving underwater in pursuit of fish,
they're actually flying underwater.
They're not, they're not a plunge diver.
They're not using their feet.
They are actually swimming with their wings.
As a result, they are they're very heavy and solid.
And that's kind of a tradeoff between a good flyer.
Like you see, I can albatross which can soar for hours on end, which are hardly moving
its wings versus a puffin in flight has having a flap really hard.
So, it cost a lot to fly in terms of energy.
So again, as you're doing photography, try not to flush them.
I'm sorry, I'm giving you so many warnings.
And so, the ways to go out and see them, while, of course, Alaska is wonderful.
And there are a lot of tours that will take you out to see puffins there.
You can do that here in Washington.
And the best spot to see them from shore is actually at Cannon Beach, looking at Haystack
Rock.
And that's the best spot I can think of where you can actually go right to a colony, not
very far off shore, and if you have a powerful enough lens, you can get some nice shots
from there.
And at the public access beach.
And they're used to people there.
So, it really doesn't have much effect on them.
And if you wait until early August, then they'll all be provisioning, they'll all be coming in with
bill loads of fish.
So, if you want to get sort of the classic shots of birds flying with bill loads of fish,
wait until early August. Don't go late August or early September.
A lot of them will already be fledged and you'll see fewer and fewer birds.
But early August is a great time.
[Chris] Great, thank you, Scott.
I'm gonna wrap us up here, just really quick.
Hopefully what your seeing is
my screen from "The Thaaank youuu" slide.
And I want to thank you for sharing all this information, and some of the really good advice
that you have for us.
And then also thank the audience for joining us.
I wanted to just, in this quick wrap up, let you know that.
So, this platform that we're using, the National Marine Sanctuaries Webinar Series is, it provides
educators and students and just the interest, generally interested public with educational
and scientific expertise, resources and training to support ocean and climate literacy.
So, you can visit this website that I have listed here to look at upcoming webinars that
might have interest to you.
But it's also will provide you access to archived webinars.
In fact, once we finish the closed captioning and so forth, with this video, it'll be available
there as well.
I did want to make a quick plug for our next
Speaker series with the Olympic Coast National Marine
Sanctuary and Feiro Speaker Series.
That'll be with Dr. Pearson's, one of his co-workers, Eric Wagner.
And he's going to be talking to us about Destruction
Island and what they're seeing there.
So, I hope you'll sign up and join us on that day.
And then for those of you that are onboard here tonight, we're gonna send you a certificate
of attendance, which represents one contact Hour of Professional Development, especially,
those of you that are professional education educators, this could be quite valuable for
you.
Then any questions that we weren't able to get to, during our question-and-answer period,
we'll send those off to Scott and ask him to give us an answer, and we'll send those
back out to you at a future date.
Then, last but not least, please do take a couple minutes to take that short survey,
because it really helps us find out from you what worked well, and also what you'd like
to see as far as informational topics in the future.
And so, with that I'm going to say thank you again very much for, for joining us tonight.
[Scott] Thank you. [Rachele]
Thank you! [Chris] Hope to see you next time.