MORE than 300 individual puffins have been counted on Lundy Island, from a low of only five birds ten years ago.

Two hundred (or 100 pairs) are thought to be breeding; the remaining third are likely to be prospecting birds, which may breed in the future.

Rats, which feast on the eggs and chicks of burrow-nesting birds such as puffins, were eradicated from the island between 2002 and 2004 as part of the Lundy Seabird Recovery Project, with the island being formally declared rat-free in 2006.

Manx shearwater has also thrived, with the most recent figures recording some 3,400 breeding pairs, from a low of only 300 pairs when the project was planned and conducted.

RSPB senior conservation officer, Helen Booker, said: “We expected Manx shearwater would benefit from rat eradication, and we have certainly seen that, but we were much less optimistic about the puffins. Ten years ago its population had reached such a low level we worried whether it would survive, to see that puffin is now doing so well really is exciting.”

Becky Macdonald, the Landmark Trust’s warden on Lundy, said: “The increase in Lundy’s seabird colonies, particularly the enigmatic puffin and elegant Manx shearwater, illustrates the importance of seabird recovery projects and the need to protect our seabird populations from controllable threats, such as predation by non-native mammals.”

The Lundy Seabird Recovery Project was chiefly intended to boost the population of Manx shearwater, which at the beginning of the century was a higher conservation priority than the puffin.

But the puffin’s problems have multiplied since: the bird is struggling in northern Scotland, Orkney, Shetland, the Faroe Islands, Norway and Iceland, following a crash in the number of sandeels, the puffin’s preferred diet, probably triggered by warming sea temperatures.

There has been no breeding at all in some of the northern colonies in the same ten years that have witnessed such a resurgence of Lundy’s population.

Birds in places such as Lundy, but also in South Wales, Ireland, and elsewhere around the Irish Sea, have been able to exploit alternative food sources, such as pilchards and anchovies, numbers of which appear to be increasing in the southern parts of the puffin’s breeding range.

The Lundy Seabird Recovery Project was a partnership between the RSPB, the Landmark Trust, Natural England, and the National Trust.