Against Puffin Hunting: Meet Seabird Researcher Erpur Snær Hansen

Erpur Snær Hansen navigates long hours and an uncertain future with the cutest study subjects

“I haven’t taken a decent vacation in 15 to 20 years,” admits Erpur Snær Hansen, as he joins me on a call from Heimaey, the largest island in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago where he leads seabird research at the South Iceland Nature Research Centre. “But it’s sort of a vacation to be out there working with nice crews,” he smiles. “It’s fun and challenging — you have to be very innovative with weather and everything else to make it work.”

Erpur and his colleagues from Náttúrustofa Suðvesturlands monitor puffins throughout Iceland, often employing advanced technology such as drones and burrow cameras. They collaborate with organisations and scientists worldwide on some of the most comprehensive seabird studies. Recently, Erpur released new findings that demonstrate the unsustainability of puffin hunting in Iceland. We found a moment in Erpur’s busy schedule to take a closer look at his daily work with Iceland’s most iconic bird.

I became interested in birds when I was 11, simply because I found a bird guide at home and was fascinated by it. It was Roger Tory Peterson’s guide translated into Icelandic. My interest grew from there — I learned the bird names in Latin and, suddenly, I knew 600 species. I became a twitcher, trying to find as many species as I could.

I started ringing birds when I was only 15 — that’s when I first came to Heimaey, in 1981. Early on, we primarily focused on petrels. For two decades, we came to the Westman Islands almost every year to ring birds, coincidentally during the annual drinking festival.

Narrowing the focus

For my honours thesis, I initially wanted to study habitat selection among four burrowing bird species: three that live alongside puffins and puffins themselves, which are the dominant species. But when I reached 226 pages, I realised that covering everything would make the thesis excessively long and I was already running late. So, my thesis ended up being solely about puffins.

“Puffins might be the most popular animal on the planet, as they seem to fulfil human criteria of cuteness, curiosity and awkwardness.”

I moved to Heimaey in 2007 to become the director of South Iceland Nature Research Centre. There are eight centres around Iceland — ours is located in the Westmans. I study seabirds, but in particular puffins all around Iceland in 12 colonies. We also have a temporary research program on the nocturnal seabirds that are living more or less in the Westman Islands. This includes two species of storm-petrels and one species of shearwater — the Manx Shearwater. This project is basically the PhD thesis of Stephen Hurling — there is a crew working out in Ellidaey, the loneliest house in the world, or whatever they call it on Facebook.

Environmental sentinels

The puffin is the most common bird in Iceland and also the most hunted one — or it used to be. Their clumsiness is basically due to the specialisation of flying both in air and underwater. Yes, they fly underwater — they pull their wings together and make them smaller. That makes them not very agile or manoeuvrable in flight. They need very fast flight to remain airborne because they have relatively small wings, given their body size or weight. It’s very expensive for them to fly. The further away they fly for food, they get into trouble bringing enough food for the chick. This makes them perfect sentinels for monitoring what’s going on. Since what they’re eating, the sandeel is actually the key species in the ecosystem. Everybody eats sandeel — whales, cod, haddock, seabirds, everybody. If the sandeel is doing something weird, it affects everybody else, including our commercial fisheries. It seems that puffin data has more information to offer than many of the other data series — you can gain a lot of information from the puffins.

Puffins are key species in Iceland. They fertilise all these islands and completely terraform them into their own burrow systems. They have a housing project of 2.6 million burrows, or between 2.6 and 3 million burrows. Most of the time they don’t dig their own burrows, they take over old burrows. So, these burrows are in use for a long time — decades if not centuries.

Puffins have a 7% divorce rate, which is lower than humans. But they normally divorce after a breeding failure. If we have a very bad year, like in 2005, 2010, 2013 in the Westmans, more of them split up and we have fewer birds breeding the next year as a result, or they take a sabbatical. We are hoping to model how these dynamics work. It’s becoming a big modelling enterprise called Integrated Population Model, or IPM. We took a lot of different kinds of data and tried to figure out the metapopulation. If things are going bad in one place, how does it affect other places?

Beyond cuteness

The most fascinating thing about puffins is their tool use. There’s a little video that became viral a couple of years ago; it’s only 10-15 seconds long. We just accidentally recorded it — a puffin there takes a plant root and scratches its belly briefly. Any tool use is very uncommon for seabirds. It’s actually not common in nature. This cute story was all over all major media outlets. We stopped counting when we got over 100 mass media mentions. The media attention was as if Elvis was back from the dead, showing up in downtown New York and combing his hair.

“Puffins have a 7% divorce rate, which is lower than humans.”

I think puffins might be the most popular animal on the planet, as they seem to fulfil human criteria of cuteness, curiosity and awkwardness. Although there’s a reason for most of these traits, their popularity is undeniable — we have 10 to 15 different film crews coming to document our puffin rescue every year. This number seems to be growing annually and they’re all essentially selling the same story.

People find puffins amusing, which is good because it brings attention to them and their current problems. It also shines a spotlight on our work and what’s happening — a focus that other species, which might be doing even worse, don’t get.

The reality is that all seabirds in Iceland are more or less eating sandeel, not just puffins. All of them are having problems when sandeel populations aren’t doing well. Puffins are like a sentinel for all our seabirds, if you will.

Data-driven concerns

Puffin hunting is unsustainable; their numbers are still declining, even though the decline has reduced because they are doing better in the Westman Islands. The harvest is adding to the decline, as it reduced from 250,000+ to 25,000. We recently published a study where we use five or six different methods to process and analyse the data, and they’re all agreeing with each other. It’s fairly robust and there’s a high probability that this is true: the declines are going to continue given that the situation has been similar in recent years. And if the hunting continues in similar form, that will increase the declines also.

What we are most interested in doing is trying to stop commercial hunting. People who kill a few birds for their family and cultural tradition are not the real problem, or much less of a problem than people who are going out and making money off this, killing a few thousand puffins and selling them to restaurants, which are paying premium prices. Ignorant tourists are not aware or don’t care that they are eating an unsustainable species. We are hoping we could stop this practice altogether. But there doesn’t seem to be much political interest in doing that; politicians don’t want to take that fight on, they probably think it’s not worth risking their political popularity for an issue like that. But it’s strange to treat one of your main tourist attractions this way.

Want to learn more about puffin research in Iceland? Head to nattsud.is