- The biggest colony of puffins in Britain has suffered
a "disastrous" breeding season. the worst breeding year on record.
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- Thousands of puffin chicks have failed to hatch or have
starved to death in the St Kilda archipelago, home to 136,000 pairs, and
many of the survivors are reported to be very poor condition.
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- Conservationists say the current breeding year is the
worst on record in one of the most important seabird breeding areas in
north-west region of Europe.
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- The conservationists believe the problems that have caused
widespread breeding failures among seabirds on the east coast of Britain
in recent years have now moved to affect the Atlantic seaboard.
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- The collapse is blamed on global warming and the disappearance
from UK waters of the sand eel, the staple diet of many seabirds and a
vital element in the marine food chain.
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- St Kildans, before the island became uninhabited in 1930,
saw the puffin as an important part of their diet. In 1876, the islanders
were said to have killed 89,600 of the birds for food and feathers.
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- Some scientists believe a two-degree increase in ocean
temperatures in the last 20 years has forced sand eels, and the plankton
they feed on, to move to cooler waters.
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- The two marine wardens on St Kilda, which was the first
part of Scotland to be declared a World heritage site, said that they were
shocked by the large number of dead chicks they found during a visit at
the weekend.
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- During a count on Dun, a small island in the St Kilda
archipelago, 41 miles west of the Outer Hebrides, they found significant
numbers of dead chicks in nesting sites or burrows where they had marked
100 eggs in May.
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- One of the wardens, Sarah Money, said: "The puffin
is usually one of the more robust seabirds, finding alternative sources
of food when other species struggle.
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- "This is a really worrying sign that something is
badly wrong with the health of our seas.
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- "As soon as we entered the colony we could tell
that something was wrong. We saw dead downy chicks scattered on the ground
in front of us. Only 26 per cent of the burrows had live chicks in them
and many of these were severely underweight.
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- "This is the worst year ever in terms of success
over the time they have been studied. Previous studies have shown that
the survival rates generally come in at around 71 per cent on St Kilda,
with only one poor year over the study period when productivity was down
to 44 per cent."
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- Ms Money added that the puffins had been bringing back
pipefish to feed their young, because of a lack of sand eels, but the problem
with this was that pipefish had "almost no nutritional value whatsoever".
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- She said: "As pipefish have an average length of
25 centimetres, getting this down a chick is no mean feat.
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- "This is a really poor sign. It looks like the puffins
have been unable to find enough decent food to maintain their chicks, which
are simply starving."
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- Susan Bain, of the Natural Trust for Scotland, which
owns St Kilda, said only one young puffin turned up on the main island
of Hirta last summer, compared to hundreds in the 1980s.
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- St Kilda, which was bequeathed to the trust by the 5th
Marquess of Bute in 1957, is also home to the world's largest colony of
gannets, and the biggest colony of fulmars in Britain.
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- Martin Scott, of the Royal Society for the Protection
of Birds, said: "This is a very worrying trend and appears to be moving
over to the west coast.
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- "It looks like a repetition of what has happened
in the North Sea and in Orkney and Shetland."
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- Meanwhile, a large number of seabird chicks are said
to have died in the Western Isles in recent weeks because of starvation,
or because they were too weak to survive an unseasonal storm.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne
ws/2005/07/28/npuff28.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/07/28/ixhome.html
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