In early 2026, after a season of severe storms, hundreds of dead and dying puffins, guillemots and razorbills were washed up on beaches in Cornwall, Scotland and north-east England. Conservation groups also counted more than 20,000 stranded birds, mostly puffins, along Europe's Atlantic coasts. For a species that now adorns souvenir shops and children's books, it was a grim reversal. The history makes the timing harder to bear.

For centuries, people harvested puffins by the thousand on their breeding grounds, taking them for meat and feathers. The environmental historian Dr Rob Lambert has described the slow change in attitudes as a journey "from use to delight": the bird's clownish face and awkward charm eventually earned it affection rather than appetite. Yet the same human activity that now protects puffins in law is endangering them through the atmosphere. The mechanism is largely a matter of food.

As oceans warm, fish such as sand eels move towards cooler waters and may decline or vanish near the colonies where puffins nest. Parents must then fly further, or search for longer, to feed their young, and chicks are less likely to fledge. Those that do survive are weaker, and less likely to endure the winter, when storms, which are becoming more frequent and more severe, kill many seabirds outside the breeding season. Climate change is not acting alone.