On the chalk and limestone cliffs of Purbeck in Dorset lives the last puffin colony on the south coast of mainland England, and it is tiny: in recent years only a handful of birds have returned each spring where eighty pairs once nested. This year the National Trust and a devoted band of volunteers watched the cliffs for fifteen straight weeks, through courting, nest building, and then, from late May, the unmistakable sight of adult puffins ferrying beakfuls of fish into a deep crevice in the rock. Fish deliveries mean one thing: someone small and hungry in there.
Then it happened. A puffling, the first seen at the colony in more than thirty years, emerged from the nest and made it out to sea. The volunteers described themselves as thrilled, which given fifteen weeks of cliff watching feels like British understatement of a high order. One chick is not a recovery, but it is the thing every recovery starts with: proof that the colony can still raise young, and a reason to keep watching next spring. Somewhere off the Dorset coast right now there is a young puffin learning to fish who has no idea how many people are quietly barracking for it.
Our short take: reported by the National Trust and its Purbeck volunteers, with coverage by PA Media. Cover photograph: Atlantic puffin by Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.