The Council of Tenerife He hopes to have today the results of the necropsies carried out on some of the more than 140 specimens of Atlantic puffins that have appeared dead on the island’s coasts, especially in the North, in recent days. These reports will serve to determine the exact cause of death of these birds that are believed to have been displaced from their natural habitat by severe storms. Some puffins have arrived alive, but due to their extreme weakness and poor condition “they have died within a few hours,” according to sources from the La Tahonilla Wildlife Recovery Center, dependent on the island administration.
Loro Parque, which has cared for a group of puffins at its facilities in Puerto de la Cruz since 2003points out that “we are always willing to collaborate with the authorities and offer an alternative to euthanasia with these rescued animals that cannot be returned to nature, as has happened with the Geisha penguin, the Federica turtle or the Morgan orca, among many others”.
Rafael Zamora, scientific director of the Loro Parque Fundación, indicates, regarding the appearance of dead or dying puffins in Tenerife and the rest of Canary Islands, that “it is an incipient phenomenon of which we already had references in 2022, with several cases of puffin specimens detected in the Canary Islands. At Loro Parque, as an accredited zoological center that keeps the species under human care, we are frequently consulted to provide the clinical and management parameters for the species, which are essential in rescue and rehabilitation cases.”
«In 2019 we received a rescued specimen from the Consortium for the Recovery of Fauna of the Balearic Islands. The bird was unrecoverable for its reintroduction into the natural environment due to the injuries it had suffered, being welcomed in the group of puffins in Loro Parque”, recalls Zamora. «We are currently in contact with the Canary Ornithological Society (SOC), which has been informing us of the different sightings in the archipelago and to which we provide first aid data for the species. On the other hand, through Poema del Mar in Gran Canaria, our veterinarian Ángel Curros is giving support to the Wildlife Recovery Center whenever it is necessary”.
SEO Bird Life notes that the breeding range for Atlantic puffins “spreads across the entire North Atlantic, as well as the Arctic seas. On the European continent, it occupies the coasts of Scandinavia, Iceland, Great Britain and northern France, an enclave that constitutes the southern limit of its summer distribution area. Its world population is estimated at around six million breeding pairs, “of which practically 50% are concentrated in Iceland, 20% in Norway, 10% in Great Britain, and the rest distributed in other areas of the North Atlantic, including Greenland and Canada. Although it is one of the most common seabirds inhabiting these cold regions, in recent times it has experienced a considerable regression in much of its breeding area.
The appearance of hundreds of dead specimens in areas where they are not common, such as Madeira, the Canary Islands or Morocco, has caused concern among experts, who are trying to analyze the origin and scope of this phenomenon. The Cabildo de Tenerife also tries to shed light on this unusual phenomenon, as well as the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), which recently opened an investigation to try to determine why more than 300 puffins have come to die in the Canary Islands, more than 3,500 kilometers from their habitat.
