The Astonishing Atlantic Puffin

Viewing the charismatic, dapper puffin was one of the highlights of my recent trip to Canada’s Atlantic provinces.  Atlantic puffins (Fratercula arctica), also known as common puffins, are easily recognized by their distinctive appearance. In their striking, black-and-white feathers, puffins appear to be in formal evening wear with shiny black tuxedos and starched white shirts.  They plant their bright orange webbed feet firmly on the ground and tuck in their short stubby wings to hold their stocky bodies vertical.
But the puffin’s most outstanding feature is its adorable face and large, brightly-colored beak.  “It is of course comically large and has been described as ‘parrot-like’.  The general shape of the beak, when viewed in profile, is triangular and bulky compared to the bird’s size.  Viewed from above or head on, however, the beak is quite slender and far more delicate-looking.  The rather large and laterally-flattened bill is gaily coloured.” explain authors David Boag and Mike Alexander in their book The Atlantic Puffin.
You can see the puffin’s beak from different angles in the below photo.
The puffin’s eyes are often described as expressive and soulful.  Interestingly, “The areas of white, or rather light grey, which give a puffin that almost human character are the face patches.  Covering the side of the face, these patches extend behind the bird’s head in a gradually narrowing point which almost meets at the back of the puffin’s head.  The shape of the bird’s head folds the plumage very slightly to the rear of the eye and this gives the appearance of a dark shadow extending towards the white point at the back of the head.  It is this line or shadow which gives the sorrowful look to the puffin’s eye.”
“The iris of the eye is very dark blue or brown and is surrounded by a noticeable red orbital ring.  The eyes are exaggerated by two horny blue-grey patches of skin above and below the eye.  The upper patch is roughly triangular while the patch below the eye is more rectangular.”
It’s almost as if the puffin’s eyes are accentuated with professionally-applied eye makeup!
But the Atlantic puffin is so much more than just a pretty face!
Most photos show the delightful puffin on a rocky cliff surrounded by a colony of its peers.  These are accurate depictions but only during breeding season which is typically May to September.  As true seabirds, they spend the majority of their time (7-8 months of the year) alone on the open ocean swimming, diving, hunting and feeding.
It’s difficult to fathom that puffins can go from a densely-populated, land-dwelling, social setting (as seen below at the Puffin Viewing Site in Elliston, Newfoundland)…

… to a solitary, ocean-dwelling, individualist setting (as seen below in the waters of Bird Islands in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia) and thrive in both environments.
In her book Puffins, author Susan E Quinlan describes the puffin’s ability to survive in the ocean, “Most birds can’t live at sea because they can’t sit on the water.  They would quickly get wet and cold and then sink and drown.
Staying afloat and keeping warm are not problems for puffins.  These birds have built-in life jackets.  Short feathers all over a puffin’s body trap a layer of air next to the bird’s skin.  The trapped air helps the puffin stay afloat.  It also acts as a blanket.  The air stops the cold ocean water from reaching the puffin’s skin.
To keep its life jacket in working order, a puffin must keep its feathers clean, soft, and waterproof… by preening, or grooming…  To preen, a puffin first rubs its bill on its preen gland.  … After coating its bill with preen oil, the puffin carefully pulls each feather through its closed bill.  The bill edges strip away any dirt and spread the oil over the feather.  Preen oil keeps the feather barbs soft and helps repel water… puffins spend a good part of each day preening.  Dressed in its life jacket of carefully preened feathers, a puffin can bob up and down on the cold sea like a cork.”
This puffin demonstrates the fine art of preening!

In addition to staying afloat and keeping warm, puffins (obviously) need food and water to survive.  As explained by Wikipedia, “The Atlantic puffin diet consists almost entirely of fish… When fishing, it swims underwater using its semi-extended wings as paddles to ‘fly’ through the water and its feet as a rudder. It swims fast and can reach considerable depths and stay submerged for up to a minute. … An adult bird needs to eat an estimated 40 of these per day – sand eels, herring, capelin, and sprats being the most often consumed.
It fishes by sight and can swallow small fish while submerged, but larger specimens are brought to the surface. It can catch several small fish in one dive, holding the first ones in place in its beak with its muscular, grooved tongue while it catches others. The two mandibles are hinged in such a way that they can be held parallel to hold a row of fish in place and these are also retained by inward-facing serrations on the edges of the beak.
It copes with the excess salt that it swallows partly through its kidneys and partly by excretion through specialised salt glands in its nostrils.”
I wasn’t lucky enough to photograph a puffin carrying fish in its beak but you can see the puffin’s powerful tongue and beak in this shot.
I came across several fascinating stories about Atlantic puffins while researching for this blog post.  For instance, in late 2019, zoology researchers published the biological sciences brief report Evidence of Tool Use in a Seabird.
Researchers observed “2 Atlantic puffins at their breeding colonies, one in Wales and the other in Iceland…, spontaneously using a small wooden stick to scratch their bodies”.  This was the first report of a puffin, or any other seabird, using a tool which “involved the direct manipulation of a detached object toward a specific part of the environment (the birds’ plumage) with a specific goal”.
The report goes on to discuss the importance of these observations: “One possibility is that the behavior arose by independent behavioral innovations as flexible problem solving by the puffins observed, or that they socially learned this behavior from other innovators. …
The propensity for behavioral innovation has been shown to increase with relative brain size in birds and primates.  Seabirds’ relative brain size is comparatively small and they are not generally described as possessing sophisticated cognitive abilities. However, they feed in patchy, unpredictable environments, where they must integrate multiple sources of physical and social information to make complex decisions in space and time. Solving such problems requires behavioral flexibility and skills in multiple domains including learning, memory, and planning, also evidenced by high levels of fidelity in migration and foraging routes in numerous species. As such, seabirds’ cognitive capacities may have been considerably underestimated.”  At the risk of drastically oversimplifying the findings, it seems puffins are smarter than we thought!
I didn’t witness a puffin scratching itself with a stick but I did see a puffin pick up a tube of ChapStick!  Aside from the fact you’d never want a puffin to mistake plastic waste for food, it was rather amusing to see a puffin walking around with ChapStick in its colorful beak!  I feel compelled to point out, I saw no other garbage at the Puffin Viewing Site—the ChapStick was clearly an anomaly.
It was more common to see puffins picking up vegetation around the nesting site.
I couldn’t find a definitive answer as to why puffins pick up grass and other vegetation.  But this explanation from the Audubon Seabird Institute notes that puffins use grass in their nests: “Puffins dig their burrows using their bills and feet.  They prefer to make their burrows in earth or between rocks on steep sea cliffs so predators cannot easily reach them.  They use their bills to cut into soil and then shovel away loose material with their feet.  They dig dog-like, shoveling dirt out behind themselves.  Most burrows are 2 to 3 feet long (70 to 110 cm) … At the back of the burrow the parents build a soft nest of feathers and grass where they incubate the egg.”
These puffins appear to stand guard at the entrances to their burrows on the sea cliffs of Bird Islands in Cape Breton.
The Audubon Seabird Institute also answers the question “How do puffins find their way home?  Puffin chicks leave a colony when they fledge and head off to the ocean without their parents.  They remain in the open ocean until they are 2-3 years old.  Then they return to the vicinity of the colony where they hatched and may nest near the burrow where they hatched.
Scientists are unsure how puffins find their way home and are still learning how birds migrate.  The puffins may make a mental map of their birthplace and use this to return later.  They may use stars, the earth’s magnetic field, sounds, smells and the visual cues of the ocean to help them make this map.  While the ocean appears uniform to us, to seabirds it holds vast amounts of information we can’t sense.  We still have much to learn from the migrations of seabirds.”
This pair of adult puffins likely returned to the nesting site in Elliston for the breeding season.
Puffin chicks are six-seven weeks old when they fledge, leaving the burrow alone, usually during the evening, and flying/swimming out to sea.  At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work!
Things did not work as intended in December 2011 when a juvenile puffin crash-landed on a brightly-lit street, known for its lively nightlife, in downtown Montréal, Canada.  “It attracted a lot of media attention … [and] generated a lot of hype” reports Bill Montevecchi, Memorial University of Newfoundland Professor and highly regarded seabird specialist, in his article Was the Christmas Puffin a Quebecer?
“Wayward young puffins often occur here Newfoundland when they depart their nesting burrows on coastal islands. It is not unexpected, and the juvenile puffins need to be retrieved and released at sea or they will die.  Owing to their high levels of stress in such situations, it is very useful to rehydrate them with lots of water and provide some food. After this, it is extremely useful to release them relatively rapidly at night by the sea from unlit coastal locations where they likely came from.
The young puffin that showed up in Montréal had most likely fledged from one of the puffin colonies in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Yet, as soon as the director of a Québec animal shelter suggested that the puffin was probably transported to the Montreal area onboard a ship from Newfoundland and that she was concerned about how to raise the $150 to fly the bird back to Newfoundland, the media engaged in a reporting frenzy.”
The rescued puffin was flown in the heated cargo bay of an Air Canada airplane from Montréal, Québec to Toronto, Ontario to St. John’s, Newfoundland.  It is unclear how the puffin handled this unnatural treatment.
“Everyone was captivated by the rescue efforts, rehabilitation and release. Everyone except perhaps a few skeptical biologists. Little consideration was given to the likelihood that the puffin flown to Newfoundland amid much to do had never been here in its entire short life. … While it is indeed reassuring to know that people will go out of their way to help a stranded animal in distress. A relatively rapid release of the wayward puffin into the Gulf of St. Lawrence would have done the trick. …
There are many things that we can and need to do to protect birds in the wild. Moving them around without sound biological rationale is not one of them. To help Christmas puffins and other seabirds, we need to garner all the public and media help that we can to accomplish this considerably onerous challenge, so maybe in its own farcical way the Christmas puffin rescue will help. I hope so.”  Given that I first learned about this wayward puffin from strangers—fellow travelers we met on Fogo Island—I’d suggest the news story did indeed raise awareness of the Atlantic puffin.
If you ever have an opportunity to view these astonishing seabirds in Newfoundland, I highly recommend visiting the Puffin Viewing Site in Elliston during nesting season.  Early morning or late afternoon are said to be the best times.  You can walk out onto the top of the rock outcropping…

…and look across the rocks (as I did)…
… at the puffins on the cliffs.
And, if you’re lucky, the puffins might land on the cliffsides right in front of you!

More Info

This is the fourth blog post about my recent trip to Newfoundland, Canada:
. Postcards from Newfoundland #1
. Postcards from Newfoundland #2
. Bibs and Bobs from Newfoundland
. The Astonishing Atlantic Puffin (this post).
As noted above, I highly recommend visiting the Puffin Viewing Site in Elliston, Newfoundland during nesting season.  For more information, check out the Elliston website.
Alternatively, a Bird Island Boat Tour in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, will allow you to view puffins from the water.  You won’t get as close but you’ll likely see a variety of seabirds and the guided tour narrative is entertaining and informative.
The following resources were referenced in the writing of this blog post:
.The Atlantic Puffin book by David Boag and Mike Alexander.  It is available on Internet Archive.
. Puffins book by Susan E Quinlan. It is available on Internet Archive.
. Atlantic Puffin article in Wikipedia
. Evidence of Tool Use in a Seabird – PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) Brief Report by Annette L. Fayet, Erpur Snær Hansen and Dora Biro
. Audubon Seabird Institute – Puffin FAQs article
. Lost Puffin Found 1,000 km Away in Downtown Montreal December 2011 CTV News article
. Was the Christmas Puffin a Quebecer? article by Bill Montevecchi

Today’s Takeaways

1. “While the ocean appears uniform to us, to seabirds it holds vast amounts of information we can’t sense.  We still have much to learn from the migrations of seabirds.”  Audubon Seabird Institute
2. Consider opportunities to view local wildlife at your next travel destination.
3. Spending time with nature can enrich your travel adventures.