Atlantic puffins are beloved seabirds whose populations are declining across their range due to food shortages driven by climate change and overfishing, causing colony-wide breeding failures and individual starvation.
Puffin welfare suffers most acutely during breeding failures caused by prey scarcity. Adult puffins make dozens of fishing trips daily to feed a single chick; when sand eels and other prey fish are absent, chicks starve over days in their burrows — a prolonged welfare crisis invisible to observers. Adults that lose breeding seasons to starvation also face energetic deficits that affect their condition entering winter. Plastic ingestion causes gut obstruction and toxic effects. Oiling from spills during the winter period at sea kills birds through hypothermia as feather waterproofing is destroyed. The long-term pair bonds that puffins form mean that loss of a partner affects subsequent breeding attempts. Conservation actions that restore fish stocks and protect breeding colonies are simultaneously welfare interventions for individual birds.