There are three pairs of puffins left on the Purbeck cliffs in Dorset. In the 1950s there were more than forty [1].
Volunteers with the National Trust and the Purbeck Natural History Forum spent 15 weeks watching them, roughly 150 hours of sitting still and looking at a rock face [1]. What they were waiting for finally happened: a puffling, estimated at 38 to 40 days old, emerged from a nesting crevice [1].
It is the first chick recorded at the site in 30 years [1].
Dr Richard Caldow, who leads the project, described both halves of it honestly. 'Seeing the puffling was a great thrill, the first puffling that's been recorded in Purbeck for a long time,' he said - and then, without spin: 'One puffling alone won't save this colony, but one is a whole lot better news than none' [1].
That is the correct size for this piece of news, and it is still worth having. Three pairs on a cliff produced a bird that nobody at the site has seen in three decades.
