Published in Perspective
August 2025
The sight is at once familiar and strange, like something I might have seen in a dream. In a blue sky, many thousands of seabirds wheeling in erratic clouds; on the blue sea, thousands more; and thousands more scattered across the dull green headland beyond. It’s only a ten-minute boat journey from the coast of Pembrokeshire, but it feels as if time has stretched much wider than that.
The island is Skomer, a Viking name. The teeming birds are not gulls but Atlantic puffins.
‘Like Jurassic Park,’ says my wife Caroline, and I almost hear the theme tune playing as we enter the bay. Comparing dinosaurs with puffins might sound ridiculous, but she has picked up on the same sense as me: that what we are looking at belongs far back in prehistory.
And it is, in many ways, a sadly prehistoric sight: natural abundance that would, at one time, have been unremarkable. I think of cod so thick in the water that boats could hardly row through them; of passenger pigeons darkening the sky over North America. Now, in the age of ecocide, such profusion is shockingly strange. At the same time, it feels like returning home.
Skomer, and the waters around it, form a Marine Conservation Zone established in 2014, the first of its kind in Wales. The designation protects puffins, razorbills and guillemots – all auks, perhaps the closest thing we have in the British Isles to penguins – as well as Manx shearwaters, which breed here in greater numbers than anywhere else in the world. In recent years the puffin population has been doing well; this season a record 43,626 individuals were recorded. Having laid their eggs and raised their young – brilliantly known as pufflings – they will soon leave, to spend the next eight months on the open Atlantic.
But for now they are here, and we have come to swim with them. Celtic Deep, the social enterprise that has organised this tour, kits us out in wetsuits, weight-belts, flippers, masks and snorkels. They also provide us with plastic decoys and, delightfully, puffin-topped hats. Soon we are gliding towards the flock. Then it is all around us.
Unlike seagulls, whose interest in humans is strictly predatory, puffins seem genuinely curious about what we are. By moving slowly and not staring directly at the birds – ‘they understand eyes,’ says Emma Williams, one of the guides escorting us – we can often drift within a couple of feet of them. Little conclaves cluster round, blinking their tragicomic eyes. Their bills are the colour of mango and papaya. This appearance, coupled with their waddling behaviour on land, has earned them the nickname the ‘clown of the sea’. But puffins are tough, as living for months on the open ocean shows – and underwater, they are acrobatic killers. Through our masks we watch them dive, knifing down into the dark on sharply angled wings, more agile in this element than they are in air. Bubbles clinging to their feathers turn them a ghostly grey, making them appear an entirely different species.
Their colour changes over the year in a more literal way; after breeding season their beaks turn from orange to grey. Their spiny tongues are designed to hold dozens of fish in place – sand eels are their favourite catch – displaying them as status symbols to impress potential mates. Emma says the most ever recorded is 62. The more we learn about these birds the more extraordinary they become, and the more miraculous their presence around us. The slopes of the island are hollowed out with burrows, where they lay their eggs. These sociable creatures raise their young in a puffin city.
An hour after leaving Skomer, I burst into tears in Lidl. We have stopped on our way home for a food shop, and the contrast – from massing birds to mass-produced consumer goods – comes as a body blow, a shock that can’t be normalised. Nature can have this effect if you’re not prepared. I leave, my reality upside down, and wander in the car park, seeing puffins that turn out to be discarded carrier bags. The effect doesn’t last for long; I am soon dragged back to the human world. The thought remaining in my head is ‘what the hell have we done?’
Some of the damage is direct: destruction of habitats and overfishing. Especially catastrophic for puffins is the dredging of sand eels. Some of the damage is indirect, but no less disastrous. One of humanity’s greatest crimes is the animals we bring with us.
Caroline and I have seen puffins before, on an island off the coast of Devon. Like Skomer, Lundy has a Viking name: Lund-ey, ‘Puffin Island’. Despite this, the puffin population was nearly wiped out at the turn of the century by an infestation of rats, most likely stowaways from ships visiting from the mainland. To ground-nesting birds on small islands, rodents are a death sentence, voraciously devouring eggs. By 2001, Lundy was down to five individual puffins. After a determined extermination campaign the island was declared rat-free, and since then puffin numbers have swelled to over a thousand. But ships still pass every day and rats can swim for a couple of miles, so the future remains precarious. It would only take a pair to reintroduce disaster.
The much smaller island of Steep Holm – like Lundy, in the Bristol Channel – is also guarded against rodent invasion. Visiting there some years ago, I happened to meet Karen Varnham, a Senior Island Restoration Specialist at the RSPB. She was examining a stalk that appeared to have been nibbled, perhaps an early warning sign of infestation. Cheerfully referring to herself as a ratcatcher, she had worked on small islands from the Caribbean to the Pacific in a career dedicated to eradicating invasive rodents. University had introduced her to the work of Elizabeth ‘Biz’ Bell, a New Zealand conservationist who has profoundly influenced a generation of ecologists, many of them women, who went on to work on small islands across the world. Karen made it clear that she didn’t hate rats – in fact, she admired their intelligence and resourcefulness – but was convinced that removing them from ecosystems they’re not meant to be in is an effective way of preventing local extinctions.
While there are no puffins on Steep Holm, the island is a protected nature reserve and a Site of Special Scientific Interest, hosting gull and cormorant colonies as well as peregrine falcons, oyster catchers and shelducks. As with Skomer, incoming rodents would spell disaster. The stalk Karen had found would be taken away to be further examined. (I wrote to her later to check the results; the island was rodent-free.)
As we sailed from Skomer, our guide Emma pointed to another small island, Ramsey. Its puffins vanished a century ago, wiped out by rats apparently fleeing a sinking ship. The rats have long since been removed, but puffins have still not returned despite efforts to entice them back, including deploying decoy birds and playing recordings of their calls through a solar-powered sound system. Puffins live for around 20 years – some sources suggest they can even reach 40 – so their extirpation from Ramsey was only a few generations ago. Perhaps there exists some communal memory of the apocalypse there, the massacre of their ancestors by long-tailed monsters.
Small islands like Skomer, Lundy and Steep Holm are intensely vulnerable, self-contained ecosystems whose borders are always porous. But their relative isolation makes them important refugia for species that have disappeared elsewhere. Humans cause immense harm, but – like Karen, and the team at Celtic Deep, a social enterprise with conservation at its heart – are also actively intervening to mitigate calamity, and in some cases to reverse the course of destruction. I can see why Karen works in this field. On a local level, restoration can be transformational.
We drive home on motorways, with nature depleted on every side, but our close encounter with puffins feels transformational too. Soon they will leave for the North Atlantic with winter on the way; their beaks will turn grey; puffin city will be silent till next spring. For now, it’s enough to know that they are surviving, holding on.
The question ‘what the hell have we done?’ becomes ‘what can we do?’
Photo by Rick van Werven