200 | Chapter 10
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Climate is changing, at sea as much as on land. The North- west Passage,
passing north of mainland Canada and once a paradigm of icy impen-
etrability, is now being visited by cruise ships. In 2016 Caspian Terns
were discovered breeding in Alaska for the very first time, close to the
Arctic Circle.^27 Further south in the Americas, Stephen Kress, whose
working life has been a successful mission to re- establish Atlantic Puf-
fins on the coast of Maine, was shocked in 2012. Instead of bringing
cold- loving herring and hake to the chick at home in the burrow, adult
Puffins started bringing a warmer water species, butterfish. The snag was
that the chicks struggle to swallow this disc- shaped fish.^28 In a burrow
monitored by a webcam, one luckless chick died in front of a live audi-
ence, to Kress’ intense chagrin. And the problem is not local: Puffins
of south- west Iceland have been faring poorly as waters have warmed.
Grassy slopes in Iceland’s Westman Islands, pocked with Puffin bur-
rows, are now as bereft of birds as a turkey shed on Boxing Day. Nor are
the problems confined to the North Atlantic. What will be the fate of
the hapless Emperor Penguin, that necessarily breeds on sea ice, if the
Antarctic ice re- distributes or even shrinks in extent? One detailed mod-
elling study of the Emperor Penguins breeding in Terre Adélie in the
French sector of Antarctica calculated a likely decrease by 2100 from
the present 6,000 pairs to a meagre 400 pairs.^29 Other modelling work,
encompassing all European bird species, suggests a retreat of northern
seabird species: for example, Long- tailed Skuas may cease to breed along
the mountain spine of Norway, and Glaucous and Ivory Gulls may aban-
don nesting on Svalbard.^30 And, as the icecaps melt, so the sea level will
rise, a threat to coastal human communities and indeed the viability of
the Maldives as a nation state, and an equal threat to the seabirds of
low- lying tropical atolls.
Facing threats at sea from climate change, from fisheries and, per-
haps to a lesser extent, from pollution, the prospect for seabirds in the
21st Century is by no means rosy. Addressing these issues will often
not involve the technology that has generated such astounding knowl-
edge of seabirds’ seagoing lives over the last 20 years. But I can now re-
port exceptions.