Picking up Puffins on the first beached bird and mammal survey between Sao Jacinto and Torreira

On March 14 2014, a survey of beached birds and mammals was conducted along a 10 km long transect between Sao Jacinto and Torreira, by Pedro Moreira and me. The transect included 5 km of closed off beach belonging to the Sao Jacinto reserve, who gave us permission for this survey. The idea was to get an impression of what species and their numbers had been washing up on the beach along the northwestern coastline of Portugal during the previous months. None of this 10 km of beach gets regularly cleaned, making it a very suitable length of coastline for this study.

Another motivation for this activity had been the reports of large numbers of dead seabirds that washed up on beaches in France and Spain, after the ‘wreck’ that occurred earlier in the year in the Bay of Biscay due to continuing bad weather conditions (See http://www.sott.net/article/274701-Update-Tens-of-thousands-of-dead-seabirds-have-now-washed-up-in-Bay-of-Biscay and http://www.timvannus.blogspot.nl/2014/03/dead-british-seabirds-are-finding-their.html).

 The 10 km transect we walked from Sao Jacinto to Torreira.

Results

Which of these birds died in the wreck that occurred in the beginning of the year remains difficult to determine, with the absence of earlier survey results. We suspect this had been the case with all of the puffins that were found. Even the few of those that we found on the recent tide lines showed signs these had been floating in the ocean for a while. All of the Lesser Black-backed Gulls had died recently and these were probably all local birds. Also the Common Guillemot and one or two Razorbills appeared a bit too fresh to have come all the way from the Bay of Biscay.

Beached Atlantic Puffins.

 

 Three Lesser Black-backed Gulls and two Razorbills.

 Great Northern Loon.

Unidentified Seahorse...

...and a coconut.

Dead British seabirds are finding their way to Portuguese beaches?

A survey of stranded seabirds on the Atlantic coast of France has found more than 21,000 of their corpses washed up on shores between Brittany and Spain.

A co-ordinated count that took place last weekend (22-23 February) from Finistère to the Spanish border resulted in 21,341 dead birds begin retrieved, along with and another 2,784 brought to veterinary centres to aid recovery. Several thousand dead seabirds were already counted earlier in the month and fishermen and other boat users reported that there were "carpets of dead birds" still floating at sea.

See http://www.sott.net/article/274701-Update-Tens-of-thousands-of-dead-seabirds-have-now-washed-up-in-Bay-of-Biscay

Today on only a short walk on the beach near Praya de Mira (< 1 km) we found these two Puffins Fratercula arctica and one Black-legged Kittiwake Rissa tridactyla.

Fratercula arctica; but where did its wing feathers go to? I assume it has not been marked by someone.

 Rissa tridactyla.

Variation on the egg-theme.

When searching for bird nests, occasionally one can find an egg that does not look like one at all. Deformation of an egg can occur for a variety of reasons (which I will not discuss here) and can result in some strange shapes. The weirdest egg I ever observed had been laid by a Black-legged Kittiwake Rissa tridactyla in its nest on the large former radar tower on Middleton Island during the summer of 2010. I have no idea what would be the cause of its remarkable shape. 

Deformed Black-legged Kittiwake Rissa tridactyla egg found on Middleton Island in the summer of 2010 (T. van Nus)

Unfortunately, I only have these two photos to show and can’t retrieve any background information about the bird that laid it, though it possibly had been a bird that was included in some physiological study…