By Eliza Wesemann, Summer 2024 Tufted Puffin Bill Load Photography Technician
Pacific Herring, sardine, larval fish, salmon, smelt, squid, and lamprey. What do these ocean creatures have in common? They were all on the Tufted Puffin’s menu this summer, and this season the puffins ate like kings. My name is Eliza Wesemann, and this summer I worked for OSU’s Seabird Oceanography Lab as a Tufted Puffin Bill Load Photographer at Oregon’s iconic Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach.
A little bit about me – I am a senior studying wildlife ecology and management at Utah State University. I am originally from Brookline, Massachusetts, and am pursuing a career focused on wildlife conservation and research. Over the years I have aided research projects on a variety of different species including Pinyon Jays, Greater Sage-Grouse, Mountain Goats, and American Pika, but Tufted Puffins hold a special place in my heart for their outrageously cute appearance and mannerisms.
Tufted Puffins are little black football-shaped birds with two long white/yellow eyebrow tufts, and a bright orange beak and webbed feet – in other words, a very silly looking bird! The Tufted Puffin population is thriving further north in Alaska, but they are struggling in the southern part of their range, from southern British Columbia to Northern California. Historically, Haystack Rock supported the second largest Tufted Puffin breeding colony in Oregon, with an estimate of 400 breeding birds in 1978. However, recent work by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report, the Haystack Rock population has dropped to just 102 breeding birds in 20241.
(data from Naughton et al. 2007 and USFWS, unpublished)
Reflecting this decline, Tufted Puffins are listed as ‘Endangered’ in Washington state, ‘Sensitive’ in Oregon, and a ‘Species of Special Concern’ in California. Efforts to list the bird as federally Threatened or Endangered under the Endangered Species Act have unfortunately fallen short, as the Species Status Assessment came to the conclusion that the listing is “not warranted” despite the decline of coastal colonies throughout the southern range2.
Haystack Rock is 236 feet tall, with steep grassy slopes home to all sorts of species of seabird nesting and rearing young. Beyond Tufted Puffins, Pigeon Guillemots, Black Oystercatchers, Western Gulls, Brandt’s and Pelagic Cormorants, Common Murres, and Rhinoceros Auklets all call Haystack their home during the summer months. While most seabirds nest on the open slope, Tufted Puffins have earthen burrows hidden among the grass, making it difficult to keep track of active burrows and breeding pairs. In the recent Oregon Fish and Wildlife Monitoring Study, they found an estimated 51 occupied burrows with 102 breeding birds.
My goal was essentially to document the diet of Tufted Puffins by taking pictures (using a Sony A9 camera with 200-600mm lens) anytime I spotted a puffin with fish. I did the same for murres and pigeon guillemots with bill loads as well when the opportunity arose. Although the Tufted Puffins were generally the most active from sunrise to noon, their feeding schedules and Haystack appearances were elusive and inconsistent, often hard to predict. The puffins could be active and visible on the rock or in air flying laps, but not feeding; or completely hidden away in their burrows only leaving to collect fish, depending on the day. I made sure to be stationed at Haystack every morning to make sure to catch the puffins on their good eating days, as they were unpredictable.
My day-to-day schedule would be to wake up an hour before sunrise, prepare the camera and make my way down to the rock just as it was bright enough to shoot images. I would adjust the settings to the conditions of the day, stand as close as I could get to the rock given the tide, stare at the horizon, and wait until a puffin flew in towards the rock. In the time it took to spot a puffin, haul up my camera and zero in on the bird, they had often already disappeared into their burrows! Otherwise, they might fly an absurdly long lap around the rock, seemingly displaying their fish proudly! It was usually hard to tell if they had fish in their beak until after I had already taken the picture, so I would end the day sorting through hundreds of images of puffins in flight with only a small portion carrying bill loads of fish.
One of the more difficult skills I learned over the summer was distinguishing puffins approaching distantly from the sea from the other seabirds, which was even harder if the weather was overcast. Without the sun to illuminate the tell-tale white belly of the murre, the red feet of the Pigeon Guillemot and the orange glint of the puffin’s beak, the sky becomes a whirling mass of unidentifiable black flapping specks. In those moments, I would rely on the fact that puffins are slightly larger and darker against a gray sky, and hope for the best.
One of the most exciting highlights of the season was the feeding frenzy on July 23rd, where I captured a whopping 131 individual puffin bill loads on the camera. It was a very rare moment where the three variables of good puffin photos overlapped; low tide, partly cloudy but not overcast, and high puffin activity. I couldn’t put the camera down; the sky was filled with puffins with fish. Most puffins were bringing in multiple large smelt at a time, suggesting these fishes were just offshore, perhaps in a spawning aggregation. A few puffins were visibly rounder after that day – they evidently ate like kings!
At Haystack, I had the opportunity to network with other wildlife photographers about “Birds with Fish”, a citizen science project exploring the diets of Oregon coastal birds using community-sourced, non-invasive photography. One of the highlights while working at Cannon Beach was engaging in side conversations with fellow photographers about puffins, conservation, and life in general. Helping visitors tourists identify puffins from Murres, introducing the ‘Birds with Fish’ initiative, and general wildlife public education were other valuable aspects of the position that I looked forward to during fieldwork.
Another highlight of the season was assisting Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists with their burrow counts of the puffins on Cannon Beach. Together, we tag-teamed the process: I pointed out puffins and tracked them into their burrows, then marked on a map the area of the rock the puffins flew into. It was exciting to be able to contribute the skills I learned over the season for research to uncover more about the Tufted Puffins at Haystack Rock.
Puffins have always held a special place in my heart, as I initially became passionate about wildlife conservation from photographing Atlantic Puffins during a trip in Iceland five years ago. So, this position was a perfect culmination of my interests–wildlife research and photography–an incredibly valuable ecological research experience, and all while experiencing the beautiful Oregon coast.
I would like to thank Dr. Rachael Orben and Will Kennerley at OSU’s Seabird Oceanography Lab for the amazing opportunity, as well as Friends of Haystack Rock and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife for the support at Haystack Rock. This was a dream job and an experience I’ll never forget.
Acknowledgments: The Oregon Wildlife Foundation provided funding to support field work in 2024. The Friends of Haystack Rock supported this project by providing housing in Cannon Beach. Thank you!
- Stephensen, S.W. 2024. Tufted Puffin monitoring study at Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach, Oregon 2010-2024. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Unpublished Report, Oregon Coast National Wildlife Refuge Complex, Newport, Oregon 97365. 35 pp. ↩︎
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service). 2020. Species Status Assessment Report for the Tufted Puffin (Fratercula cirrhata), Version 1.0. Anchorage Fish and Wildlife Office, Anchorage, Alaska. ↩︎
