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The Seabird Everyone Thought Was GONE Forever Just Came Home

Puffins have been spotted on the Isle of Muck in County Antrim for the first time in at least 25 years, proving that a major conservation effort to remove invasive brown rats and reduce vegetation is bringing these vulnerable red listed seabirds back to their ancestral breeding grounds. What started as folklore and old tales about puffins once nesting on the tiny island off Islandmagee became reality when five puffins were seen in 2024, followed by cameras this spring catching two puffins coming and going from a nesting burrow on the cliff ledges, bringing food back in behavior that signals successful breeding. Ulster Wildlife’s nature reserves manager Andy Crory said the discovery proves that seabird restoration works, which is crucial when 24 of the 25 breeding seabird species face risk of local or global extinction.

The puffin sightings are the latest positive sign that conservation management is transforming the island, with annual surveys recording steady increases in eider ducks, guillemots, herring gulls, and lesser backed gulls year after year since the rat eradication programme began in 2017. While it’s not certain that this year’s puffins successfully reared a chick, Crory is staying positive and waiting with great excitement to see if the first “pufflings” appear on the cliffs next summer, which he says would truly be the icing on the cake. Puffins spend most of their lives at sea, only returning to land to breed in spring and summer at the same nesting site with the same partner year after year, raising a single chick each breeding season. The Isle of Muck remains inaccessible to the public, and that isolation combined with rat removal and vegetation management is giving these priority conservation species the safe haven they need to return home after a quarter century away.

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