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Puffin-Watching for the End of the World [1]

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Date: 2025-05-21

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.

I often wonder what it’s like to be an animal living through the extinction of your own species. An estimated 150 species go extinct every day, making it one of the most commonplace, yet tragic, stories in the anthropocene.

This mortality rate was on my mind when I drove to Cannon Beach, Oregon, last Sunday, in search of tufted puffins. The black, orange, and white seabird nests on Haystack Rock – the iconic sea stack featured in The Goonies – every spring and summer, and it’s one of the most accessible places to view puffins on the Pacific coast.

Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach, Oregon. (Photo by Caleb Seyala)

They burrow in the rock’s tall grasses and lay a single egg, which takes over a month to hatch. Puffin pairs take turns brooding over the egg while their counterpart fishes. Once the babies, called pufflings (I couldn’t have come up with a better name myself), hatch, their parents feed them a hearty diet of small fish until they’re ready to fly, in late August.

I’ve lived in Oregon for four years now but have never seen a puffin, despite my love of birds. That’s why I went to Cannon Beach last weekend, where puffin iconography dots every street corner and store window. This small town’s identity is built around the bird, so I knew I had a good shot of seeing one there.

Binoculars in one hand and a pastry in the other, I set off to the beach, where I wasn’t the only one hoping to catch a glimpse of a puffin. At low tide, Haystack Rock can see hundreds of visitors at one time, guided by the local Haystack Rock Awareness Program that patrols the beach in bright red trucks and keeps people from climbing on top of the boulders that clams and sea stars suction to.

A truck operated by volunteers with the Haystack Rock Awareness Program. (Photo by Caleb Seyala)

On the sea stack itself, hundreds of gulls and cormorants and common murres roost on its sheer cliffs, making an impressive show each time they dive off the rock into the choppy waters below. But as I scanned the rock with my binoculars, the puffin’s tell-tale orange beaks were nowhere to be seen.

While it’s still possible to see puffins at Haystack Rock, their numbers have been declining at an alarming rate. In Oregon, a coastwide survey completed in 2021 found just 553 tufted puffins within the state, as compared to 5,000 in 1998. On Haystack Rock, researchers counted roughly 100 puffins in 2023, about one-third of the number observed on the rock in the 1980s.

Tufted puffins are not considered endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act, but up and down the Pacific coast state legislators have rung alarm bells under their own endangered species laws. In Washington and Oregon, the puffin is listed as endangered and sensitive, respectively, and in California it’s called a “species of special concern.” A combination of threats like ocean pollution, lack of food sources, and habitat loss – issues made worse by climate change – are responsible for their decline, according to the Audubon Seabird Institute. Since the start of the 21st century, temperatures have increased exponentially, aligning with the decline of the tufted puffin.

Do the puffins who’ve survived these fraught decades know they’re dying? Have they noticed that fewer and fewer of their companions return to Haystack Rock every year? I would assume no, but who am I to say what goes on in another living being’s head?

The awareness of our own mortality seems to be a distinctly human experience, but then again, I’ve known animals who were acutely aware that their time was up. Both my childhood dogs knew long before we did that they’d reached the end of their lives, and they seemed to make peace with it far sooner than we ever did.

We humans like to think we have some superior knowledge of life because we’re aware of our own mortality, but frankly, most people I’ve observed – myself included – don’t live their lives as though they’ll end. Soothed by the constancy of routine, of patterns, most of us get away with never thinking about death at all.

Seabirds flock to Haystack Rock. (Photo by Caleb Seyala)

Puffins live a life of routine, too, but unlike humans, they do it largely unsheltered from the threats of the natural world. When I was at Haystack Rock, three bald eagles circled the beach every so often, causing the roosting birds to shriek and fly away in giant flocks. Once, one of the eagles got lucky: through my binoculars I watched it swoop behind the sea stack and a few seconds later, rise back into the sky with a common murre locked in its talons.

I was relieved that this time, it wasn’t a puffin. Just a few minutes earlier I’d finally spotted one nestled in the tall grass between the murres and gulls. With its big orange beak and matching feet, the folk name for puffins, “clowns of the sea,” makes total sense. They’re goofy looking birds, perfect mascots to build a small town’s identity on, as Cannon Beach has done.

Goofy as they look, their lives are anything but. When puffins aren’t at Haystack Rock, they live on the open ocean, sometimes 200 miles offshore, weathering extreme winds, rains, and choppy waters. They can dive up to 200 feet underwater in search of food, flapping their wings to propel themselves.

I saw three more puffins in the hour I spent at Haystack Rock. They mostly just sat around, but their rarity gets them a level up in the arbitrary hierarchy of “cool animals.” All the same, I hope to see them again before the only puffins in Cannon Beach are the illustrations on the street signs.

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