Some not so good news from England. According to an article on news.bbc.co.uk the biggest puffin colony in England has seen an unexpected decline in numbers. The colony on the Farne Islands has dropped by a third during the last five years and it is puzzling the researches since they was expecting an increase in the population this year.
The puffins seem to die during the eight months they are out on the sea and there needs to be done more research to discover what is really happening on the North Sea.

I haven’t heard any reports about the status of the puffin colonies here in Norway, but they have been very up and down the last years. In my non-scientific opinion we need to stop fishing the small fish that the puffin and much of the other birds and larger fish eat. If we remove big parts of their main food sources how are they expected to survive? This might be the reason the population of puffins in England is decreasing.
We should keep our greedy hands off this part of the ecosystem so we wont cause a total collapse.
Here is a picture from my photoblog of an Atlantic puffin that I met out on the sea during the winter in 2007. Hope to see more of these beautiful birds as they are pretty rare in my part of Northern Norway.