Tufted Puffins Are Vanishing Across the Pacific Northwest—Can an Ambitious New Effort Save Them?

On a misty August morning in Cannon Beach, Oregon, Rebecca McGoldrick’s neon-yellow boots gleam like little lighthouses on the wet sand. Her attention is riveted to a tripod-mounted camera with a telephoto lens focused on a large sea stack. She counts to herself as curious beach-walkers drift over one by one. Soon, she’s drawn a crowd asking what she’s looking at.

“Puffins,” McGoldrick says.

Puffins on the Pacific Coast? Yes—Tufted Puffins. In their breeding attire of bulbous orange bills, white masks, and pale-yellow plumes flaring from their faces like Gandalf’s eyebrows, the West Coast’s Tufted Puffins are every bit as cute as their Atlantic Puffin cousins—if not as well known. Visitors to this resort town go from incredulous to thrilled when McGoldrick points out the upright black figures with bright carrot honkers loafing on the mound known as Haystack Rock.

“I’ve been here many times and I had no idea they had puffins,” says Vancouver, Washington, resident Alan Graham. He and his daughter, June, beam as they take turns looking through McGoldrick’s lens.

It’s little surprise that these flashy birds are so incognito. Tufted Puffins spend most of their lives far out on the deep ocean. They only venture onto solid ground to nest in burrows on rocky headlands and small islands around the North Pacific, where they’re largely out of sight from the mainland. What’s more, while the species overall is currently deemed healthy—its global population is estimated at three million individuals, the vast majority of which breed in Alaska—it has recently experienced sharp declines across the southern portion of its range. Tens of thousands once bred in the California Current marine ecosystem, from San Francisco Bay to southern British  Columbia. Today they number about 2,000.

The dramatic loss of Tufted Puffins has spurred an ambitious new partnership in the Pacific Northwest. For years, nonprofits like Friends of Haystack Rock, government agencies, and academics across the region have been advocating for and studying the species. Each entity largely worked on its own until last year, when they joined forces and launched the Tufted Puffin Working Group to better understand and address the decline. The goal is to develop a comprehensive strategy to restore populations from California to Canada, says Katherine Luscher of Audubon’s Seabird Institute, who is coordinating the group and overseeing some of the projects. “But first we have to better understand why the numbers are decreasing.”

To help answer that question, this past summer researchers and community scientists were out in force counting birds, analyzing what they’re eating, and tracking their reproductive success.

Some, like McGoldrick, monitor from shore. The patient kindergarten teacher spent her summer vacation as a volunteer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the Seabird Institute, tallying the number of puffins every half hour amid a backdrop of surfers and kite-flyers, guillemots and gulls. In between counts, she and other monitors make notes on activities in the colony, such as parents swooping in with a billful of fish to feed their young. And they field questions from bystanders. (One of the most frequent is “Are those penguins?”) Other participants, like former Air Force mechanic Jeff Emanuel, motor out to island colonies, where gray whales spout and Common Murres raft alongside the boat as people onboard count puffins. Still others fly drones, snapping photos to analyze the landscape and reveal threats, such as poor habitat conditions.

The data the coalition is gathering will shed light on local and ecosystem-wide risks to this understudied species. Like seabirds everywhere, puffins’ troubles on land signal serious changes in the sea. The North Pacific is one of the most rapidly warming ocean basins on the planet, with rising sea temperatures and other climate change-driven shifts already creating a more challenging environment for marine life. 

Scientists are concerned that the problems now plaguing Tufted Puffins at the southern extent of their range are a preview of what’s to come in their core habitat to the north. If the coalition can figure out what’s driving the decline in the California Current and how to help that population survive, it could help safeguard the species as a whole in the uncertain decades ahead.

Tufted Puffins are hardy mariners. At about a foot tall, they tower over their Atlantic cousins and are heftier than Horned Puffins, which inhabit many of the same waters but primarily breed farther north. Compared to these other puffins—as well as guillemots, murrelets, murres, and other members of the auk family—they also spend the most time far out at sea.

Throughout most of their roughly 20 years of life, Tufted Puffins reside on deep water, clad in dark plumage, secluded, and seldom seen. In the frigid Bering Sea and across the Central Pacific Ocean from North America to Asia, they dive up to 200 feet deep for prey such as jellyfish and squid.

Then, beginning around March, they arrive at remote breeding colonies that arc along the North Pacific Rim, from northern California’s foggy Farallon Islands on the east side to Japan’s snowy Hokkaido on the west. They arrive dressed to impress, with flamboyant head plumes, vivid bill extensions, bright eyeliner, and stockings. Couples, which generally mate for life, reunite after winters apart, while first-time breeders form new bonds. Pairs reclaim their old burrows or dig new ones using their hard bills and feet to carve winding tunnels several feet deep, then lay a single egg.

Chicks remain underground while their parents forage, returning with bill loads of as many as 20 small fish, such as herring and anchovies, several times a day. When the chicks are six to eight weeks old, the exhausted adults head back to sea, leaving the now-grown youngsters to fend for themselves. The hungry pufflings emerge on their own and, under the cover of darkness, fly down to the ocean, where they’ll remain for three years or longer before returning to their natal colony to breed.

Beyond these basics, however, much about these birds remains a mystery. Little is known about their migration routes, for instance, or where they go and the conditions they face on the open ocean. Long-term population data are scarce due to the remoteness of their colonies and the difficulty of counting them in underground burrows. The species is also highly sensitive to disturbance, which can cause parents to abandon their nest—ruling out the use of hands-on research methods and equipment such as satellite trackers on this struggling population. Because of such challenges, “we just know less about Tufted Puffins in general,” says Don Lyons, conservation science director at the Seabird Institute. “And certainly less about what is driving their population decline, particularly in Oregon and Washington.”

Habitat damage, invasive species, and predators are all contributing factors, says Scott Pearson, an avian ecologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife who’s seen the effects of all three. “The one thing I worry most about, though, is global climate change and the warming of the ocean,” he says.

Rising sea temperatures pose multiple challenges. The ocean’s growing heat load is amping up winter storms at sea, reducing puffins’ ability to feed during the nonbreeding season. Marine heat waves—unusually high ocean temperatures for at least five straight days—are also becoming more frequent and intense. These masses of warmer water hinder cool, nutrient-loaded upwellings from the depths, displacing the cold-dependent fish that puffins and other seabirds prey on. That forces parents to travel farther to forage for their chicks. As a result, nests may fail, and adults may even starve.

Take the Blob, the most notorious of the Northeastern Pacific’s recent spate of marine heat waves. From 2014 to 2016, ocean temperatures spiked as much as seven degrees Fahrenheit, killing thousands of Tufted Puffins, along with enormous numbers of Common Murres, Cassin’s Auklets, and other alcids.

Moreover, studies show that seabird populations have been slow to bounce back from such die-offs. Many species lay only one egg a year, and chicks take several years to mature. As marine heat waves occur more often or become more prolonged, populations may not have time to recover at all.

Due to these dynamics, the outlook for the Pacific Northwest’s Tufted Puffins is bleak. While southern colonies are seeing the greatest drops, the birds are losing ground throughout much of their range, and climate-driven perils are creeping north. Marine heat waves, for example, are projected to become more frequent and severe from California to Alaska. Large colonies in the Gulf of Alaska, home to more than a third of North America’s Tufted Puffins, are already starting to wane—and could disappear within a century.

Studying Tufted Puffins could do more than help the species. It could also provide insights into the changing ocean. When nesting, says Lyons, these deep-diving, far-ranging seabirds are out sampling the marine environment many times a day. “If we listen to what they might tell us through their choice of food or their ability to successfully raise young,” he says, “we stand to learn a lot about the ocean that would be very hard to learn otherwise.”

While conservationists and scientists know there are no quick fixes to the challenges facing ocean ecosystems, their findings might help guide fishery management plans or designate marine protected areas. The members of the Tufted Puffin Working Group are also looking at ways to boost the birds on land, giving them a better chance at surviving the shocks of marine heat waves and other pressures at sea.

On a small island off northern Washington, Pearson smiles as he watches a puffin arrive with a load of small silver fish dangling from its bill. The bird lands on a grassy hillside, struts over to a hole the width of a cereal bowl and disappears inside. “That’s burrow number two,” says Pearson. “My favorite burrow!” Four years ago Pearson witnessed the couple now raising their third chick dig this cavity. “One day I saw a bunch of dirt flying, and then they both came out and their heads were all brown,” he recalls.

Over the past 15 years, Pearson and Peter Hodum, a University of Puget Sound conservation biologist, have been monitoring Tufted Puffin colonies at 40 sites along the Washington coast and Salish Sea, which extends from the southern tip of Puget Sound to the northern stretches of Vancouver Island. The previous evening, they motored out through the Quillayute Needles National Wildlife Refuge and camped here on Destruction Island, a long, flat islet topped by a decommissioned lighthouse and off-limits to the public.

Pearson picks up his binoculars to take another count. He scans land, sky, and water for the next 30 seconds, tallying puffins. The birds are engaged in their morning social behavior: strutting around like proud homeowners, mates affectionately clacking bills, parents resting before their next foraging run. Between counts, Pearson photographs birds arriving with food; later he’ll examine the images to determine the fish species. He also keeps track of which burrows receive deliveries—a telltale sign they contain chicks. Hodum, meanwhile, steps gingerly across the hill, carefully snaking an infrared camera into burrows to check for chicks and assess their development.

As many as 350 pairs of Tufted Puffins bred on this 30-acre island half a century ago. This year, there are just 12 couples and only 10 chicks.

One of the suspects in the colony’s decline hops brazenly uphill. Someone, likely a former resident lighthouse keeper, brought European rabbits to the island sometime in the 1900s. Now they run wild. The voracious grazers have devoured large swaths of the island’s thick, native perennial vegetation, allowing short, non-native annual grasses to take hold. As a result, hillsides have eroded, destabilizing the terrain where puffins and other seabirds nest. Slumps have crushed burrows—and possibly some occupants. The colony has lost at least five burrows in the past eight years, Hodum says.

Wildlife officials have been developing a restoration plan for Destruction Island that could begin as early as next fall. It calls for restoration experts to eradicate the rabbits and then replace the annual grasses with native vegetation to shore up the terrain. As a final step, Pearson and Hodum are considering drilling holes in the stabilized hillside to give puffin couples a head start on new burrows, as well as setting out decoys to entice the social birds to check out the new digs and, ideally, take up seasonal residence.

It’s a well-established technique for rebuilding seabird colonies, pioneered by Audubon’s Project Puffin in the 1980s when decoys painted to resemble real birds proved invaluable for restoring Atlantic Puffins to historic breeding colony sites in Maine. Pearson and Hodum have begun trying the approach at the only two colonies remaining in the Salish Sea. On Smith Island, where around 21 pairs nest today, the decoys seem to be generating a little interest. “Folks have seen some Tufted Puffins associating with the decoys, at least briefly,” says Hodum.

At Protection Island, 15 miles south, currently home to just one couple, new puffin neighbors haven’t been drawn in by the appearance of a thriving colony—though Bald Eagles have. “They attack the decoys almost daily,” Pearson says. On Smith and elsewhere in the region, rebounding populations of Bald Eagles are menacing colonies, preventing parents returning with food from landing. It’s a complicated issue to address, due to the eagle’s federally protected status.

Luscher hopes to get a similar decoy project or two underway in Oregon next summer. Researchers there have begun using drones to survey puffin habitat, look for active burrows, and identify areas for restoration. Scans could be compiled into three-dimensional models that allow scientists to identify which colonies would be best able to support a larger population. After that they’d aim to translocate pufflings that, hopefully, would fledge from their new homes and return there to breed and grow the population—another technique that helped restore Atlantic Puffin populations in Maine. Marine heat waves have also hit those restored colonies hard in recent years, but so far they are remaining fairly stable in the face of climate change.

As they work together toward a better future for Tufted Puffins, scientists and volunteers alike appreciate these enigmatic voyagers. Perhaps no one admires them more than Tim Halloran does. The retired high school biology teacher has spent 20 hours a week monitoring the colony at Haystack Rock every summer since 2012 as a volunteer for the FWS. Hours of observation have forged a deep connection to the species. “It’s a really noble bird that deals with so many difficult forces,” says Halloran, who officially retired from monitoring last year but still visits the colony nearly every week.

Working in Tufted Puffins’ favor, however, is the fascination and wonder they inspire in everyone who encounters them. As Halloran scopes Haystack Rock for the umpteenth time, a man comes running over. “Are there puffins?” shouts Bobby Wells, Jr. He and his friend Sergio Perez practically leap with excitement as Halloran points out the orange-tipped flying footballs winging home to their young. “We’re from Texas,” Wells says. “When we heard there were puffins here, we just had to see them.”

This story originally ran in the Winter 2025 issue as “The Puffin Brigade.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.