The Atlantic Puffin is a northern bird of the seashore, spanning the Atlantic from the east coast of Canada to Iceland to the North Sea. It is the official bird of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. This is a most distinctive, even comical, bird in its shape and coloration. Stocky shape and black above-white below make it somewhat reminiscent of a penguin, except that it can fly. The beak, however, is the strangest part. It is large and triangular, good for catching fish. But the brilliant red and yellow bill really catches attention, apparently for its mate also.
Like plumage, the outer horny layer of the bill is shed in the fall, so as to be not quite as big or brilliant. The birds nest in burrows that they take over or dig themselves, where they care for one white egg (National Audubon Society: Field Guide to North American Birds, John Bull and John Farrand, Jr., Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1998). The puffin does not mate until five-years old and, then usually for life, even though they may not see each other for eight months after the nesting period. They find each other again at the same burrow although there may be a contest if another bird tries to start a manage à trois. Winters are spent at sea, usually not far from the nesting colony location, but perhaps as far away as New York.
The origin of the name “puffin” is obscure, but was used to refer to meat of the young of another bird in the British Isles a couple centuries ago, and later applied to the bird that now bears the name. The scientific name of the Atlantic Puffin is Fratercula arctica. It belongs to the same family as auks and murres, also northern sea birds. There was another member of the family that was hunted by humans for hundreds of years. The large (three feet tall), flightless Great Auk became extinct in 1844. The birds lived on rocky islands in the arctic of North America and Europe and were hunted for food, oil, and down feathers. As they became rare, museums began buying the skins. The story is told that the last birds that lived on an island near Iceland were killed wantonly and the skins sent to Belgium. An unsubstantiated sighting occurred in Labrador in the 1850s (The uneasy story of how the Great Auk went extinct (zmescience.com)). John James Audubon’s painting of the Great Auk is appropriately bleak (The Birds of America, with foreword and descriptive captions by William Vogt, MacMillan Co., New York, 1942).
The Atlantic Puffin is not as big as the Great Auk, standing at about 12 inches tall with a wingspan of 21 inches. Their stubby wings do not make them fast flyers but excellent swimmers, using their wings like flippers under water. They can carry up to 40 small fish in their beak at a time to their single young. Their nests are at the top of cliffs where there is at least some soil, supporting a burrow up to six feet deep. The fledgling vacates the nest on its own accord at night, sometimes leaving the parents clueless enough to bring food to an empty nest. A great general source for bird habits and habitat is: The World Atlas of Birds (Sir Peter Scott, ed., Mitchell Beazley Publishers, Ltd., London, 1974).
