Counting the Faroes' Half-Million Puffin Pairs

Havstovan, the Faroe Marine Research Institute, monitors fish stocks, plankton, seabirds and marine mammals on the Faroe shelf, and has tracked puffin nesting holes on the island of Skuvoy since 2005. Its 2025 review of half a century of data, published in Frontiers in Marine Science, links seabird trends to fish availability: common guillemots fell by roughly 70% at the Hovdin monitoring site between 1972 and the early 2020s, and puffin attendance dropped sharply after 2002, which led to a halt in hunting. Puffin breeding success has improved markedly since 2014, peaking in 2017, 2023 and 2024, and the species is still listed as vulnerable. Havstovan is a public research institute rather than a campaigning charity, so this is science the islands' policy is built on.