Saving Puget Sound's puffins: Bringing these ocean ambassadors back from the brink

Hundreds of seabirds clung to Williamson Rocks, a guano-covered cluster of stone and grass rising just above the high tide line in Burrows Bay, near Anacortes, Washington. The spectacle drew a flurry of shutter clicks from photographers on a passing tour boat.

The islet brimming with cormorants and gulls on a recent Saturday was missing at least one photogenic element, though.

Decades ago, tufted puffins nested there, as the comical-looking seabirds once did throughout Washington’s San Juan Islands.

“Historically, puffins were throughout Washington state waters, outer coast of Washington, all the way through into the Salish Sea, and up into British Columbia,” said University of Puget Sound seabird biologist Peter Hodum. “Fifty or 70 years ago, you probably could have seen them a lot more easily.”

In 1954, a Walla Walla College biology professor named Ernest Booth recorded tufted puffins on Williamson Rocks. One of the flamboyant seabirds issued its rumbling growl of a call, while a baby puffin — known as a puffling — shrieked its pleas for its parents to bring fish back to their grassy burrow.

1954 tufted puffin recording at Williamson Rocks, Washington, by Edward S. Booth, courtesy Cornell Lab of Ornithology/Macaulay Library

Seventy years later, you’re more likely to encounter peanut butter Puffins in the cereal aisle of a Friday Harbor supermarket than an actual tufted puffin anywhere in the San Juan Islands.

“Most people don't know we have tufted puffins in the state of Washington,” Hodum said.

Up and down the West Coast, populations of the cute seabirds with giant noses have plummeted since the 1980s. Only in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands are the ocean-roaming puffins thriving.

Seabirds like puffins are declining in much of the world. Nearly one in three seabird species is threatened with extinction, according to International Union for Conservation of Nature, making seabirds one of the world’s most threatened types of animal.

“In the 70s, when you were out at sea, there were just a lot more birds out there than there are today,” Oregon State University biologist Rachael Orben said. “It seems to be a pretty pervasive pattern across a range of seabird species.”

In 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service denied a request to protect the tufted puffin as a threatened or endangered species, citing its large Alaskan populations.

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Tufted puffins are endangered in Washington state, and researchers hope to boost their sagging population there, currently estimated at 2,500 birds statewide.

Of the 43 Washington islands known to have harbored tufted puffins, only 19 still have breeding puffins, almost all of them off the Olympic Coast, Hodum said.

The puffins used to nest in burrows on bluffs throughout the San Juan Islands. All those colonies are gone now.

While puffins spend most of their lives far out at sea, they still grace the waters of Washington state each summer during their nesting season. Encountering the charismatic birds usually requires a boat trip to forbidden or dangerous-to-approach islands.

The only sizable colony in Washington’s inland waters occupies the most isolated speck of land in Puget Sound.

“This is Smith Island. We are looking at the western-facing bluff right here,” Salish Sea School naturalist Olivia Fross told passengers on the bow of the tour boat Koinonia. “That is the puffin colony.”

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Five miles from the nearest terra firma, low-lying Smith Island sits by itself near the eastern entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The island's lighthouse has crumbled into the sea, and its buildings are abandoned. Smith Island is now a hard-to-reach wildlife refuge, off-limits to humans but welcoming to puffins.

Fross said it's her favorite place on earth.

“Puffin right off our port side,” she told the binocular- and telephoto-lens-toting passengers. “All of that stuff in the water is bull kelp. This is the largest bull kelp bed in Washington state.”

Smith Island is currently home to about 25 breeding pairs of tufted puffins.

Tufted puffins are not Washington’s only species of puffin. An individual horned puffin, a species rarely seen so far south, has somehow made a home with the Smith Island colony, possibly even breeding with a tufted puffin this year. Biologists also categorize a more common Salish Sea species, the rhinoceros auklet, as a type of puffin, though it lacks the oversized bill of other puffins.

“We've got a rhino off the bow. We've got a tufted puffin at about two o'clock, with the murre behind it,” Fross said.

Other seabirds, such as phalaropes and jaegers, generated some excitement aboard the tour boat full of die-hard birdwatchers. But puffins were clearly the star of the show.

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Dazhen Pan of Bellevue is the kind of birder who travels to other continents to add more species to his life list. He estimated he has seen “1,400-something” bird species.

Pan went on the Smith Island tour to see a tufted puffin, named for the curving golden tufts above its ears, for the first time.

The mostly black seabird with a white face and gigantic orange bill almost looks like it has long blond hair.

“I see these, like, golden locks. It's just so amazing,” Pan said.

“It's as good as it gets, I think,” he added. “That was wonderful.”

Tufted puffins are more sensitive to disturbance than many seabirds, and Washington has lost about 90% of its tufted puffin population.

“They're divas,” said Pete Hodum with the University of Puget Sound.

Their underground burrows are easily disturbed by humans or animals, from rats to feral rabbits. Hodum and colleagues have received funding to eradicate European rabbits from Destruction Island, a major nesting spot for auklets and puffins off the Olympic Coast.

Puffins have the impressive ability, thanks to inward-pointing spines on their bills, to carry a dozen or more fish at a time back to their hungry chicks. Still, declining populations of fish like herring and smelt, diminished by coastal habitat loss, fishing, and marine heat waves, have left puffins with less to eat.

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“Then you have skinny, unhappy chicks that probably won't make it past fledging,” said Rachael Orben from Oregon State University. “As the ocean warms, food webs will change and will be less productive, and that will make it harder for seabirds to find the food that they need.”

At Smith Island, the kelp forest that shelters the island from storms and harbors young fish has been declining.

Parts of the bluff where puffins use the same burrows year after year are eroding.

Hodum aims to find undisturbed bluffs to reintroduce puffins to.

“We're trying to better understand which islands, if any, might be a good fit for a restoration,” Hodum said. “We don't want to bring them back into a system that can't support them.”

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One challenge will be enticing puffins to relocate.

Researchers are trying to attract puffins to new burrows with life-size decoys on Protection Island, a wildlife refuge near Port Townsend.

The puffin colony there has been decimated by bald eagles and other factors, and is down to just two nesting pairs. Hodum also plans to try playing puffin calls to lure the birds to good habitats, a strategy used successfully with Atlantic puffins in Maine.

Saving Washington’s puffins will require addressing the local threats to their habitats and the global forces, like climate change, that are making the Pacific Ocean less seabird-friendly.

The hope is that these colorful birds can keep being charming little ambassadors for the ocean they rely on.

Correction 8:30 a.m. 10/3/25: An earlier version misstated naturalist Olivia Fross's first name.