Hundreds Of Dead Puffins Are Mysteriously Washing Ashore In Alaska

Two horned puffins perch on Alaska’s St. Paul island. Hundreds of puffins have washed up dead on the island’s rocky shores. The puffins were not supposed to be there. Though the birds are a common sight on the Alaskan island of St. Paul, they typically fly the coop before October, heading south to overwinter. But a few bedraggled birds had been discovered on the wind-swept, rocky shoreline of the North Pacific island during the first week of October. “It was odd because we don’t usually see them here this time of year,” said Aaron Lestenkof, who monitors the local environment as one of St. Paul’s island sentinels. Stranger still, the puffins didn’t startle and move away when people approached them. Some fell over onto their bellies, too weak to waddle. Local conservationists began investigating the cause of the orange-beaked birds’ incapacity. Then their probe took a grim turn. “By mid-October the dead ones started showing up,” Lestenkof told The Huffington Post over email last week. “The first week collecting birds, I went out every day and was picking up a carcass every 15 feet in some areas.” Lestenkof had collected dozens of dead puffins within days, the lifelong resident of the island said. “In past years, we would find about two or three dead puffins in a season, which was fairly common,” said Paul Melovidov, another sentinel who has spent weeks combing beaches for puffin carcasses and photographing the finds. “When you have 40 to 50 dead and fully intact puffins arrive on your shore within a week, it’s cause for alarm.” At least 250 dead puffins have since been found on St. Paul, according to reports. Some of the puffins found dead in St. Paul this October. Scientists fear thousands more may have died in the surrounding areas, ravaging local populations of the bird. And they worry that the mass deaths could signal an impending collapse of ecosystems in the vast Bering Sea, whose turquoise waters lap St. Paul’s shores. It’s home to whales, walrus, orca, fur seals and many species of seabird. It also supports some of America’s most productive fisheries, including a $1 billion-a-year pollock fishing industry. The sea, which touches Russia on one side and Alaska on the other, is said to provide more seafood than any other in North America. Experts are still trying to determine the cause of the puffin deaths and what it all could mean, but some are blaming climate change. It already appears to be transforming the Bering Sea, and devastating the ecosystems and communities that depend on it. “The Bering Sea has been off-the-charts warm,” Nate Mantua, an ecologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, told National Geographic. “We’ve never seen anything like this. We’re in uncharted territory. We’re in the midst of an extraordinary time.” The maximum summer temperatures this year in the Bering Sea were the warmest ever recorded. Janet Duffy-Anderson of NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center told HuffPost that 2016 was the […]

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