Science

Tracking the migration of the Atlantic Puffin

• Fascinating
• Relevant
• Ingenious

The journeys of migratory seabirds are truly remarkable, spending the majority of their lives at sea, far from land and returning once a year to their colonies to breed. During this relatively brief period (in the UK summer on Skomer Island, off the coast of Wales) we have begun to attach small tracking devices to individuals to try and understand more about their amazing movements when they are not breeding.

We have recently seen that Atlantic Puffins can show a remarkable consistency in their migratory routes (get the paper here: A Dispersive Migration in the Atlantic Puffin and Its Implications for Migratory Navigation). Each year, outside of the breeding season, individuals return to the areas they visited the previous year (see an example here: Puffin Migration). What's remarkable is that each individual goes to a different area. We think that this means that individuals learn where best to forage at an early age by exploring the ocean and then gradually refining their routes to maximise their foraging success. However, it’s not yet clear how stable these routes remain over many years and how sensitive they may be to environmental change.

In order to better understand these possible changes, and how our climate may be affecting their migratory journey, we are keen to continue to track these individuals over the coming years, resulting in a longitudinal dataset of migratory behaviour. As part of the #SciFund challenge, we're looking for people to help us continue this research and to aid us in this effort to understand the movements of these amazing animals.

Your contributions will enable us to continue this project into the future. All funds will go towards the purchase and deployment of tracking devices. Out hope is to gather enough funds ($5000) to deploy approximately 20 devices this coming year, but any additional funds will be used to purchase additional devices, both to gather a larger dataset and possibly for use in subsequent seasons. The more funds we can gather, the better!

As these are annual migrations, we're going to offer contributors access to what we do in the field when we deploy the devices (through regular emails/a blog) and we're going to offer higher level contributors digital and hard copy maps of the migratory journeys that we collect. However, as these are annual migrations and contributors might not want to wait a whole year, we're going to offer these maps at the end of the coming summer using the data we're going to recover (from devices deployed last season).