Stoner (2024)

Katie Stoner, PhD student under the advisement of Dr. Don Lyons at Oregon State University, conducted her second field season of geolocator tagging work on Tufted and Horned Puffins (Fratercula cirrhata and F. corniculata) in partnership with Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) Avian Biologist Robin Corcoran. With field assistance from Megan Boldenow of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Ecological Services Alaska Region, and Marc Romano and Becca Scully of the Pacific Seabird Program, Stoner retrieved 15 geolocators from Tufted Puffins and three from Horned Puffins in 2023 and deployed a second season of geolocators. A third season of deployments is planned for summer 2024. To investigate mechanisms influencing winter movements of puffins, Stoner recently analyzed winter grown feathers for corticosterone signatures with Katie O’Reilly at the University of Portland and partnered with Michael Polito at the Stable Isotope Ecology Lab at Louisiana State University to measure stable isotopes as a proxy for diet in the same feather types. Stoner is also using long-term survey data collected by Kodiak NWR to estimate puffin population sizes and trends in the Archipelago and estimate gillnet bycatch risk through an assessment of spatial overlap. Partners Alaska Maritime NWR, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Institute for Seabird Research and Conservation, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Oregon Coastal Islands NWR also collected biological samples from puffin colonies to support Stoner’s assessment of range-wide Tufted Puffin diet measured through stable isotope analysis.