Photo Credit: E.J. Peiker, Nature Photographer

An Introduction

Why Should You Care?

This website's purpose is to bring attention to the conservation issues that the species the tufted puffin, Fratercula cirrhata, currently faces in the Pacific Northwest. The tufted puffin deserves to be studied and cared about because it is a species that has seen a drastic decline in numbers over the past century, at least in the Pacific Northwest region. The tufted puffin population in Washington state numbered more than 25,000 individuals in 1909 but had decreased to only about 3,000 individual puffins by the first decade of the new millennium, a drop of about 88% (Hokum 2014). The breeding population in Oregon was known to have been about 6,000 in 1967 and had declined to only 146 breeding-capable puffins as of 2009, an immensely alarming decrease of 98% in less than half a century (Hokum 2014). As can be clearly seen here, the tufted puffin is a species that is highly threatened and is on a downward trend that could lead to extinction if something isn't done to help protect it by taking stock of the threats that it faces and trying to come up with solutions to fight back against them.

 What are the Issues?

Fratercula cirrhata is a particularly vulnerable species that is facing a variety of conservation issues such as increased predation, the effects of invasive species, and climate change which is affecting the availability of its food supply. Increased predation includes concerns that the tufted puffin faces with its natural predators, especially the bald eagle. Climate change is a wide-spreading topic, but challenges that the tufted puffin specifically has to deal with in regards to it include global warming, sea level rise, an increase in global average ocean temperatures, and increased precipitation. The increase in global average ocean temperatures in particular is affecting the tufted puffin's food supply availability by changing the timing of ocean upwelling events and shifting the quality of the available prey items. As always, each of these different types of threats to the tufted puffin population in the Pacific Northwest are interconnected and affect each other both directly and indirectly. In this website I aim to educate you, the people of the Pacific Northwest, as to what the conservation issues are that the tufted puffin faces in the area so that we can understand what's happening to them and try to fix it, or at the very least raise public awareness of the issue.