Outside these times, you will not see any fish being carried and each colony has slightly different timing so plan your timing to give you the best chance to coincide with puffins carrying fish. Try and visit between early/mid June and mid/late of July, which is main period when puffins are feeding their chicks and therefore carrying fish. Visit a puffin colony in June and July To get a true picture of what puffins feed their chicks we need pictures from puffin colonies across the UK. We need to find out more about the causes of this decline and my colleague Dr Ellie Owen, Conservation Scientist at the RSPB Centre for Conservation Science, has started this project to do just that. Warming seas, caused by climate change, affect puffins’ food sources and are thought to be the main threat to their survival. In recent years puffins numbers across the UK and Europe have plummeted, leading to the species being declared vulnerable to global extinction - with further declines of between 50-79 percent projected by 2065. What if I told you that scientists need us to send them our pictures of puffins? I am very excited to announce that today we are launching a new citizen science project about puffins! This summer at the RSPB we are asking visitors to puffin colonies across the UK and Ireland to help us with an important research: we need you to become ‘Puffarazzi’ and take photographs of the birds carrying fish in their bills. With their colourful bills and eye markings puffins are a great subject for every photographer, even for an amateur like me. Pictures of these funny looking birds take a good percentage of the memory of my phone and of my computer. Every time I visit a puffin colony I always take hundreds of photos, even if I have thousands of them. No doubts about it, puffins are my favourite birds.
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