Return of the Puffins
Those popular clown-faced seabirds, Puffins, have returned to Ramsey Island off the Pembrokeshire coast after an absence of over a century.
But the 200 birds the visitor on holiday in Wales will see on the nature reserve island at the moment are impostors! They are in fact realistic plastic models of these attractive little black and white auks placed along the cliff tops in an attempt to lure the real birds back to breed there. Tourists on holiday in Wales may be interested to learn that this plastic invasion has been orchestrated by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to try and re-establish the breeding colony that existed there until 1894 when rats forced the puffins to abandon their clifftop burrows. Rats are anathema to Puffins whose nesting sites in old rabbit burrows are easy targets for the voracious rodents who like nothing better than a Puffin egg or chick for dinner. The RSPB have now rid the island of rats, but the puffins, it seems, have long memories and will not nest on Ramsey.
Visitors on Wales holiday are familiar with the Puffin colonies on Skomer and Skokholm islands on the other side of St Brides Bay where they can watch these quaint little birds coming and going with beaks full of sand eels for their young. In the eveings they congregate around their nesting sites like so many little party-goers in their dinner jackets, their faces bright with yellow, blue and red markings.
The RSPB experiment is not the first to have been tried. Holiday in Wales visitors may well recall a similar bid by the Wildlife Trust for South and West Wales at Cardigan Island off the southern tip of Cardigan Bay 20 years ago when decoys were placed on the cliffs to bring the Puffins back. There, the rats came ashore from the wreck of a steamer in the 1930s, and the puffins abandoned the island.
The decoys placed on Cardigan Island for several seasons failed to do the trick and the Puffins are no longer on the list of avian inhabitants although other seabirds such as guillemots and razorbills still colonise the inaccessible cliff ledges.
Holiday in Wales visitors to Ramsey Island have a rich variety of birds and sea creatures to see on the island and off its shores, It has a flourishing grey seal colony and there have been frequent sightings of Dolphins, Harbour porpoises and even Killer Whales and Sunfish off its coast.
Visit Bluestone for more information on Pembrokeshire holidays
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/destinations-articles/return-of-the-puffins-4600747.html
About the Author
No comments:
Post a Comment