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Normal winters would have brought 3 or 4 puffins to the Bay of Biscay, but this winter saw 35, with countless more thought to have drowned in the ocean
* Record numbers of puffins have been washed up on Bay of Biscay

* A few die each year, but recently many more have died due to storm weather

* Drowning is common cause of death for the puffins

* They are often swept away in strong storms while hunting at sea

Thousands of puffins are feared to have been killed in the recent storms that have hammered the UK for the last month.

The British Trust for Ornithology said today it's received a record number of reports of puffins, wearing uniquely-numbered metal rings showing they are from the UK, being washed up dead on the coasts of France and Spain.

It's feared they have been wiped out in their thousands while hunting far out to sea in the storm-lashed Bay of Biscay for their favourite food, sand eels.

BTO spokesman Paul Stancliffe said: 'Sadly, the sight of a puffin, beak full of sand eels, might be a little harder to come by this summer as they struggle to survive the recent storms that have rocked the Bay of Biscay.'

In a normal winter, the BTO would expect two or three ringed puffins to be found in the Bay, which covers western France and northern Spain, but during the last few weeks, more than 35 have been reported and countless more are feared to have been drowned and lost forever far out at sea.

The previous highest number of ringed birds found was back in 1979 when 17 dead puffins were reported.

British puffins head out into the Atlantic for the winter months, riding out the worst that the weather can throw at them.

As the winter progresses, they make their way back into the Bay of Biscay before heading home to their breeding colonies and the burrows and tunnels in the ground on clifftops that they used the previous summer.

The BTO says that puffins found in this winter's so-called 'wreck', have come from colonies in west Wales, northern Scotland, Orkney and Shetland.

Mark Grantham, ringing officer at the BTO, said 'Up until the last couple of weeks it seemed that our puffins might have survived the worst of the winter.

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The previous high number of puffins found on the bay, 17 back in 1979, has been shattered this year
'However, from the reports of ringed birds that are being washed up on the Biscay beaches it would seem that the recent storms were just too much for many of the puffins.

'It is still early days and the number of ringed birds found is likely to rise further, but we must remember that if over 35 ringed birds have been found, many un-ringed birds must have been affected too.'

Bird ringing in the UK is organised by the BTO and is carried out by licensed volunteers, who ring over a million birds of a wide variety of different species every year. It is the information received from these rings, when found and reported to the BTO, that enables scientists at the Trust to chart events such as this.