As the long summer days of August turn into nights, a few dozen volunteers gather in the small community of Witless Bay, a tiny town on the Atlantic coast about a half-hour’s drive south of St. John’s, capital of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. After a briefing by a coordinator from conservation NGO the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), the volunteers don reflective vests, grab butterfly nets and flashlights, and place plastic crates in their cars. They then set off scouting the 15-kilometer (9-mile) coastline for tiny, black-backed pufflings, the name for baby Atlantic puffins (Fratercula arctica). It’s a daily ritual for the Puffin Patrol, a grassroots movement that began in the 2000s and now comprises nearly 1,000 volunteers every August. That’s when fledging Atlantic puffins from North America’s largest colony of the species, Witless Bay Ecological Reserve, leave their burrows for the first time. Under the cover of darkness, hiding from their predators, the tiny birds venture into the ocean, where they spend the next four years of their lives before coming ashore to breed. Atlantic puffins also breed in parts of the northeastern U.S., the U.K. and northern Europe. Lifelong monogamous pairs return to the same burrow each year and lay a single egg. Both parents raise the chick for about three months before the young leaves the colony. On this journey, most pufflings find their way to the ocean. A few (less than 1%, according to a 2021 study) instead end up on land.…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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