Save the Pufflings: Think like an Ecosystem

Puffins are those comical seabirds of the North Atlantic with the outsized orange bills and matching orange legs and webbed feet.  Their walk is somewhere between a waddle and a march and their puffed out white chests and black tonsure lend them an unexpected air of dignity.  You would never call them graceful, however.  Each time they come in for a landing, they look as though they’d never done it before.

Puffins spend their lives at sea except for the few months of the year they come to land to breed.  Although at sea they are rather solitary, on land in the breeding season they are wildly social, congregating on rocky ledges in ever-shifting talkative grouplets.  Their vocalizations are a big surprise.  They sound exactly like chain saws – there is no other way to describe it. 

The puffins breed in burrows.  They return to the same burrow year after year and reunite with their mate amidst a great deal of joyful bill clacking and affectionate preening.   Working jointly, they refurbish the nest with grasses, straw and attractive bits of greenery. 

Thanks to the miracle of video streaming, you can watch all this in real time on the explore.org website.  The burrow camera is on Seal Island in the Gulf of Maine where the puffin population has been brought back from zero through a restoration project that began in the 1970s. 

The single puffin egg is improbably large and it seems as though the parents practically climb on top of it to incubate it.  The baby puffin emerges scrawny and wet, and then suddenly goes poof! and turns into a fuzzy black beachball that waddles.  The baby is called a puffling.  That is the technical term. 

Once the puffling hatches, the parents go into overdrive to care for it.  For the first few weeks, one stays in the nest brooding the baby or, when it gets larger, just throwing a wing over it.  The other parent goes fishing and the two trade shifts all day.  When the baby is old enough to thermo-regulate, both parents spend most of their time fishing.  Pufflings are prodigious eaters.

The funny thing is that, despite their enormous bills, puffins eat small, thin fish such as sand eels, herring and hake.  The pufflings, whose bills are small, can only eat fish of these dimensions.  These are cold water fish.  If the sea surface temperature rises – one of the entirely predictable consequences of global warming – they go deeper, out of the diving range of the adults.  The parents then are forced to bring other fish back to the puffling.  Often, these substitute fish will be too large for the baby to swallow.  Puffins do not regurgitate food like albatrosses or tear it into pieces like ospreys.  They just drop the fish on the ground and the puffling gobbles it up.  That is, if it is not too big.  If the only available fish are too large for the pufflings, they starve.  The parents can do no more.

Puffins are not an endangered species.  They rate high on the adorable index, right up there with pandas and lemurs, but they are not as yet threatened with extinction.   This, in a way, is what makes their story important.  The problem of climate change is not a species problem although we tend to focus on individual species or individual events like hurricanes and fires.  Climate change is above all an ecosystem problem.  But it is hard to see an ecosystem.  You see species but you don’t see the food chain they depend on.  As the food chain degrades, there will be fewer of the things you can see.  It happens gradually, and it will come to seem normal.  New generations of people will grow up with the expectation of few or none. 

The puffins are merely among the dearest examples of how global warming will disrupt entire ecosystems.  Many right whales, for example, also breed in the Gulf of Maine and elevated sea surface temperature is putting pressure on their food resources as well, undermining their ability to reproduce. 

Climate change is like a disaster unfolding in slow motion.  There is no specific marker that will tell us “too much.”  We can’t take a snapshot of an ecosystem in the process of collapsing.  We are a very visual species, but looking won’t show us what is happening before our very eyes.  Perhaps we could learn to think like an ecosystem – with more capaciousness and complexity, more senses and sensibility. Thinking like an ecosystem might mean taking the long view while noticing the small changes. 

Think like an ecosystem.  Save the pufflings.