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 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.
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.
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.”
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.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.