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| It's great to be on Skomer - a pair of puffins admire the view |
SIGNS are it could be a bumper year for the puffin colony on Skomer Island off the Welsh Coast.
According to a count conducted on March 28 by the Wildlife Trust of South & West Wales, 42,513 puffins had returned to breed - almost 10 per cent more than the 38,896 recorded last year (though still below pre-war figures).
Data from other parts of Britain is awaited, but there is no great confidence that the declines of recent years - particularly in northern colonies - will have been reversed.
The Skomer birds are subject to extensive research by fieldworkers, both from WTSWW and from Oxford and Gloucester Universities, who hope to find clues about the optimum conditions for puffins that might prove beneficial to any initiative to restore colonies elsewhere.
A puffin’s diet largely consists of sand eels and herring, and it is generally believed that warmer seas are causing mismatches between peak populations of these fish and puffin breeding seasons, leading to poor chick growth.
But why is Skomer bucking the trend?
The absence of ground predators will be a factor, but there could be others not yet understood.
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