I have so many things to write about — the amazing things we saw on our recent UK trip, as well as everything going on in the action-packed few blocks around here in the midst of crow nesting season.
Partly as a distraction from the stress of minute-by-minute nesting news, I’ve decided to write today about puffins.
Yes, puffins.
Just saying the name makes me smile.
I’ve always wanted to see them and, having almost reached my 70th birthday without a single puffin sighting, I added that to my dream list for the trip — along with seeing all of the UK versions of corvids, of course!
We saw two puffins in North Wales, but the the real puffin-palooza was on the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland.
We ended our UK trip in the North East because that’s where I grew up and where I still have dear friends and family.
Mostly we stayed in Newcastle, but we also had three nights in Berwick-upon-Tweed (a lovely town right on the England-Scotland border) in order to explore some of the wilder parts of Northumbria. I’ve always wanted to go to the Farne Islands, a world famous habitat and breeding area for sea birds and grey seals.
I should add that it’s also famous for saints, hermits and Grace Darling, the heroic lighthouse keeper’s daughter — but I’ll just stick to the birds for this post!
Luck was with us for our trip in many ways. The National Trust had closed the islands to visitors for two years after an outbreak of avian flu — but just re-opened them this March. Also (and this is vital for someone as prone to seasickness as me) the crossing was smooth, there and back!
Before we saw puffins we spotted guillemots, grey seals, shags (smaller cousins to the cormorant,) razor bills, eider ducks, black headed gulls, sandwich terns and kittiwakes …
Guillemots allopreening
Lots of guillemots!
Shags drying off their wings after a dive
Nesting kittiwakes
Razorbills
Grey seal greeter
And … at last … puffins!
Puffins afloat around the islands!
When puffins arrive back at the islands in spring for the mating season, they form rafts of floating birds before they make landfall. It’s on the water that they pair up with their mate before moving to land to lay the eggs. Puffins are mostly monogamous, so they will usually mate and nest with the same partner, year after year.
The eggs are laid in burrows about a metre long. Puffins lay only a single large egg each spring and both parents pour all of their resources into raising that one precious chick — or puffling!
I managed to capture a couple of puffin mating behaviours — one of them is the male flicking his head back repeatedly and making grunting sounds.
This is, apparently, very popular with the ladies! Unfortunately, the sounds of all the other seabirds drowned out the grunting part.
The other behaviour, similar to ravens and their beak play courtship, is the clacking of beaks together.
The first words that come to mind when seeing these birds are “cute” and “adorable” — and so they are — but there is SO much more to them.
While their waddling gait on land makes them look like inebriated penguins …
… these birds are amazingly tough and built for life on the sea. During nesting season each puffin parent will spend seven hours a day under water as well as whatever flying time is needed to bring food to that one precious puffling in the burrow. They commonly dive to 15 metres but can get down to 60 metres if necessary.
And those puffin faces! The beaks that look as if they have been carefully painted on fresh each morning in front of the mirror! The little rosettes at the side of the beak! The dashing red legs!
All of these things make them look so sweet to our human eyes — but there is a puffin-precise purpose to each part of the amazing display.
Puffins do not look like this all year round! After nesting season they shed the colourful outer layer of their beaks and in winter are dark, rather dull birds out at sea — but as soon as their little bodies receive the “more light so spring is near” memo they start the transformation.
Developing the coloured beaks and bright legs is a costly metabolic proposition, requiring lots of top quality nutrition to get that bright and impressive “look-at-me-what a-fine-specimen-of-top-breeding-puffin-I-am” look. A young puffin won’t be ready for breeding until they’re at least five.
In the crowded puffin colonies it’s vital to look splendid, both to attract a mate and to command the respect of your fellow puffins.
The colony may seem a model of good puffin behaviour, with returning puffins bowing upon landing to show proper humility and then strutting around to show just the right amount of puffin confidence. All of this is a carefully developed social network, brilliantly described in The Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson.
Of the appearance of summer puffins, Nicolson writes:
“Breeding puffins, like hidalgos at court, need to look like heroes, an exhibition of their own marvellousness.”
Their decorous behaviour mostly avoids inter-puffin fighting . Gulls, with their 3 or 4 eggs, can afford the risk of a brawl or two, but the puffins, with that single precious one, seek to avoid conflict as much as possible.
“Occasionally, there is a fight and a tussle between the birds in which they go rolling down the hillside, bill clamped to bill, but on the whole they avoid confrontation, standing alone, held in a silent net of body-signals.”
Adam Nicolson, The Seabird’s Cry
So, as adorable as these birds may look to us, to themselves they are immaculate courtiers in a dangerous society; violence held at bay only by everyone following the strict rules and manners of nesting co-existence.
Having seen puffins once, I’m now somewhat consumed by the desire to see them again.
Perhaps, another year, we could visit a month or so later and hope to see … pufflings!
Note: The Seabird’s Cry is an amazing book — written as if the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins were also a bird scientist. Thanks to my friend, Pauline, for introducing me to it! I’ve learned a lot about puffins, seabirds, all birds and how we think about birds from it already, and I’m not even finished. The Guillemot chapter made me cry. Highly recommended!
Perhaps my favourite paragraph on puffins in The Seabird’s Cry:
“Watch them in a strengthening wind, so that they are flying into it almost at the same speed the wind is blowing them back, and they hang in front of you, 10 feet away, busy, looking resolutely forward and then sideways to see what you are, their features not sleek as they are at rest but ruffled, troubled, with the look of boats working in a tideway, more real and mysteriously more serious than the neat, brushed creatures you meet standing at the colony. That is a glimpse of the ocean bird, not on display but somehow private to itself, the bird that dies in winter, that in a bad year goes 300 miles or more in search of food for chicks it knows are hungry in the burrow, a bird at work, an animal who’s life stands outside the cuteness in which we want to envelop it.”
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