Puffins come and puffins go, when will our puffins come home?

Although the recent snowfall might fool us, spring is right around the corner, with the spring solstice happening just a few days ago on March 20th! With the arrival of spring also accompanies the arrival of our Atlantic puffins, adorned with their orange bills ready to return to our islands for the 2026 breeding season. Usually, we first spot our puffins while out at sea every year, as the early birds start making their way closer to land with thoughts of rekindling their relationships with their mates.

As we have spent our winter evenings longing for the sweet return of our perfect puffins, we decided to gaze back on years past to try and alleviate the torment of the waiting game.

Interestingly, between 2008 and 2022, we would not expect to see our orange billed friends until the earliest April. However, in the more recent years we have started to spot our puffins even earlier, with sightings from 2023-2025 all occurring in the later weeks of March! Even the first puffin sighting of 2022 was April 1st! 

While the winter months usually drive us closer to the indoors, spending time with our loved ones, for puffins it is quite the opposite. Puffins are true seabirds, and what this means is they will spend majority of their lives out over the ocean. While they will only come to land to breed, you may be fooled into thinking that this social behaviour seen on land is their year-round character. Realistically, puffins are mostly solitary and spend their winters following their food out in open waters. While during the breeding season puffins hunt in groups of around 7 individuals, during winter puffins will be foraging either alone, or with one other individual. Puffins follow a unique migration route and tend to repeat this winter route yearly, leading to a more solitary lifestyle.

Wintertime is also when puffins will conduct their yearly moult, losing their flight feathers. During this moulting period, they are unable to fly, and this can provide a disadvantage if their food supply is low and storms occur. Recent research suggests that the yearly moult start and finish times vary between individuals, as well as the duration. On average this moult is thought to take between 1-2months, which is a significant time for these seabirds to go without flight and limited foraging ability.  

This winter also led to a seabird wreck being documented across Europe, where an abundance of seabirds were found either deceased or exhausted and washed ashore. These incidents are usually unable to be attributed to one specific cause, and unfortunately for our puffins, they were the main victims of this wreck: along with guillemots, razorbills and terns. This winter, the Atlantic Ocean has had an onslaught of storms, and it is believed to have attributed to the starvation of these seabirds.

While the seabird wreck affected puffins, it is too early to understand how this may have affected our overall puffin populations. Thus, we must patiently wait for the puffins’ return to their breeding grounds for scientists to gather a bigger picture of the population status. The life of a seabird is not for the faint hearted, and so we keep our hopes high for our resilient puffins.  

Puffin breeding seasons are heavily tied in with their prey availability. When there is a lack of fish available, this leads to lower breeding success and longer breeding seasons, due to pufflings taking longer time to grow. Time is also lengthened due to the puffins having to forage farther from their breeding sites to acquire food for their puffling.  Alternatively, with abundance of prey in closer locations to the breeding sites, breeding seasons tend to shorten, with pufflings being fed steadily and growing more rapidly and thus leading to them flying out to sea sooner.