Atlantic puffin

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Atlantic puffin, Fratercula arctica, stands only about 20 centimetres tall on land, yet one individual in Maine once covered 4,800 miles of ocean in 8 months. Researchers know this because they strapped a light-level geolocator to its leg and then managed to recapture the bird. The tracker showed it heading north into the Labrador Sea, swinging southeast toward the middle of the Atlantic, and finally returning to land.

  That recapture was a rare feat. Puffins spend most of the year scattered across open water, and finding even one of them is a formidable task.

  This documentary follows the bird through that hidden life and through the short, crowded season when it comes ashore. It asks how a seabird ended up with a name that first belonged to something else. It asks what goes on inside a burrow in the dark, and how a chick manages to leave it. It also asks why people who adore this bird are worried about its future, and what they are doing about it.

  496312

• 2. A Friar in Orange

  ›

  In 1652, the word puffin did not describe the Atlantic bird at all. It was applied to the fatty, salted meat of young Manx shearwaters, which were then called the Manks puffin. The word is Anglo-Norman, appearing in Middle English as pophyn or poffin for cured carcasses, and it carries the sense of puffed, meaning swollen. The Atlantic species acquired the name much later, possibly because it shares the shearwater's habit of nesting underground. Pennant formally applied it to Fratercula arctica in 1768. The International Ornithological Congress now recommends Atlantic puffin as the English name, although common puffin is also used.

  The scientific name tells a different story. Fratercula comes from Medieval Latin for little friar, a reference to black and white plumage that resembles monastic robes. The species name arctica comes from the Greek arktos, meaning bear, and points to the northern constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear.

  The bird belongs to the auk family, Alcidae, which also includes the guillemots, murrelets, auklets and the razorbill. Its closest relative outside the puffin genus is the rhinoceros auklet, Cerorhinca monocerata, and together they form a tribe called Fraterculini. Two other puffins live in the northeastern Pacific. They are the tufted puffin, Fratercula cirrhata, and the horned puffin, Fratercula corniculata. The horned puffin is the Atlantic puffin's nearest relative.

  Measured from the tip of its stout bill to its blunt tail, an Atlantic puffin is 28 to 30 centimetres long, with a wingspan of 47 to 63 centimetres. It is sturdily built, with a thick neck and short wings. Males run slightly larger than females, but the two are coloured alike. The crown, nape, back, wings and tail are glossy black, and a broad black collar circles the throat. On each side of the face sits a lozenge-shaped patch of very pale grey, tapering almost to a meeting point at the back of the neck. A small peaked patch of blue-grey horny skin above each eye and a rectangular patch below make the eyes look triangular. Each eye has a red ring around it. The underparts are white, and short legs set far back give the bird its upright stance on land. Those legs and the large webbed feet are bright orange, set against sharp black claws.

  The beak is the showpiece. Seen from the side it is broad and triangular, yet from above it is narrow. The half near the tip is orange-red and the half near the head is slate grey. A yellow chevron-shaped ridge divides the two colours, and a yellow, wrinkled rosette sits where the mandibles join. With age the bill deepens, its upper edge curves, and one or more grooves may form on the red portion. Despite the comic look, the bird has a powerful bite.

  Much of this decoration is seasonal. At the close of breeding, the bird partly moults, shedding the bright plates and appendages on its face. The bill then looks narrower, its tip duller and its base darker grey. The eye ornaments drop away so the eyes appear round, and new head and neck feathers leave the face darker. Few people ever see this winter look, because the birds leave their chicks, head out to sea and stay there until the next breeding season. A juvenile resembles a duller adult. It has a much darker grey face, a narrow dark grey bill with a yellowish-brown tip, and dark legs and feet. Each year its bill broadens, its face patches grow paler and its legs and beak brighten.

  Three subspecies are generally recognised, called F. a. arctica, F. a. grabae and F. a. naumanni. They differ only in size, and the size grows with latitude. A puffin from northern Iceland weighs about 650 grams and has a wing length of 186 millimetres. One from the Faroe Islands weighs 400 grams, with a wing length of 158 millimetres. Birds from southern Iceland fall between the two. Ernst Mayr argued that this gradient is ordinary variation at the edge of a species' range, and that no subspecies should be recognised at all.

  91076911

• 3. Months Alone at Sea

  ›

  More than one square kilometre of ocean is available to each puffin, which is why almost nobody ever sees one far from shore. The bird belongs to the cold waters of the North Atlantic, including the North Sea, and it may enter the Arctic Circle. In summer its southern limit runs from northern France to Maine. In winter it can range as far south as the Mediterranean Sea and North Carolina.

  Out there, puffins lead solitary lives. They bob like corks and keep turned into the wind, even when resting and apparently asleep. Much of each day goes to preening and spreading oil from the preen glands. The downy underplumage stays dry and provides insulation. Black above and white below, the bird is also camouflaged. Aerial hunters lose it against the dark water, and attackers from below mistake its pale belly for bright sky.

  Taking off, a puffin patters across the surface while flapping hard. Its wings have to work both in air and underwater, so they are small for the bird's weight and must beat several times every second. The flight is direct, typically about 10 metres above the waves, and the bird can reach 80 kilometres an hour. Landing is clumsy. It either crashes into a wave crest or, in calmer water, does a belly flop. It mostly travels by paddling with its webbed feet and seldom takes to the air.

  The annual wing moult also happens at sea, usually between January and March, with young birds starting a little later. Most land birds lose their flight feathers one pair at a time so they can keep flying. The puffin drops all its primaries at once and gives up flight entirely for a month or two.

  Below the surface, the puffin uses its half-extended wings as paddles to fly through the water and steers with its feet. It hunts by sight, reaches considerable depths and can stay under for up to a minute. Its diet is almost entirely fish, with occasional shrimp, other crustaceans, molluscs and worms in coastal waters. It can eat fish up to 18 centimetres long, but the usual catch is around 7 centimetres. An adult needs an estimated 40 of these a day, most often sand eels, herring, capelin and sprats.

  The bill is built for multiple catches. A muscular, grooved tongue pins the first fish against the beak while the bird goes after more. The two mandibles are hinged so they can be held parallel, and inward-facing serrations along the edges keep a row of fish in place. Small fish are swallowed underwater, and bigger ones are carried to the surface. All that seawater brings in excess salt, which the bird handles partly through its kidneys and partly through specialised salt glands in its nostrils.

  The winter months are also when puffins die. Among ringed birds that failed to reappear at their colony, only 5% were lost during the breeding season. The rest vanished somewhere between leaving land in summer and returning the following spring. Birds from different colonies tend to spend the winter in different areas. Researchers found no link between mortality and environmental factors such as temperature swings. Birds that begin the winter in poor condition are less likely to survive than those in good condition.

  5625232421

• 4. Colony Life

  ›

  Each spring, mature puffins come ashore, usually at the colony where they hatched. Chicks that researchers removed and released elsewhere later showed loyalty to their release point instead. Arrivals gather for a few days in small groups on the water offshore before moving to the cliff-top nesting sites.

  The world's puffins are concentrated in a few places. More than 90% of the global population is in Europe, which holds between 9,550,000 and 11,600,000 adults, and Iceland alone is home to 60% of all Atlantic puffins. The largest colony in the western Atlantic, estimated at more than 260,000 pairs, is at the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve south of St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. Other major sites include the north and west coasts of Norway, the Faroe Islands, Shetland, Orkney and the west coast of Greenland. Smaller colonies exist in the Murmansk area of Russia, Novaya Zemlya, Spitzbergen, Labrador, Nova Scotia and Maine. Islands attract the birds more than mainland sites, probably because they offer protection from predators.

  Inside a large colony, physical boundaries such as stands of bracken or gorse divide the birds into subcolonies. Early arrivals claim the best real estate, which means the densely packed burrows on grassy slopes just above the cliff edge, where take-off is easiest. Puffins are usually monogamous, but this results from loyalty to a nesting site more than loyalty to a mate, and pairs often reuse the same burrow year after year. Late arrivals get pushed to the periphery, where predators are more dangerous. Younger birds may come ashore a month or more after the adults and find no sites left. They do not breed until the following year. If the ground cover around a colony is cut back before these subadults arrive, more pairs can nest successfully.

  Puffins approach a colony with caution, and none likes to land where other puffins are absent. Each bird makes several circuits before alighting. On the ground, much time goes to preening, setting each feather in place with beak or claw, and to standing by burrow entrances and interacting with passing birds. A dominant bird stands upright with fluffed chest feathers and a cocked tail, then walks slowly in an exaggerated way, jerking its head and gaping. Submissive birds lower their heads, hold their bodies horizontal and scurry past. A bird about to take off briefly lowers its body, then runs down the slope to gain speed. If one bird is startled into the air, panic can spread, and the whole colony launches into a great wheeling circle.

  Activity peaks in the evening, when birds stand at their burrow entrances, rest on the turf or stroll about. Then the slopes empty. The birds fly out to roost at sea, often choosing the fishing grounds so they are ready for early-morning provisioning.

  Puffins are energetic burrow engineers, and a grassy slope can end up undermined by a network of tunnels. The turf dries out in summer, vegetation dies, and the wind whirls the dry soil away. Burrows sometimes collapse, and people can cause this by walking carelessly across nesting slopes. A colony on Grassholm was lost to erosion when so little soil remained that burrows could not be dug. Replacing a lost colony is hard, because this gregarious bird nests only where others already do.

  1928631222

• 5. Egg to Fledgling

  ›

  At the burrow, one partner often stands outside the entrance while the other digs, and the digger kicks out soil and grit that showers its waiting mate. Whether the pair meets offshore or only at last year's nest is unclear, since each bird spends the winter alone. Some birds gather dry grass stems as nesting material and others skip it. Sometimes a beakful goes underground only to be carried out again and dropped.

  The pair renews its bond through billing. The two approach, wag their heads from side to side and rattle their beaks together. The behaviour happens repeatedly and continues, to a lesser degree, through the whole breeding season.

  Puffins become sexually mature at 4 or 5 years old. They dig their own burrows or take over holes dug by rabbits, and they have been known to peck at the original occupant until it leaves. On occasion they nest in crevices and among rocks and scree. Manx shearwaters also nest underground and sometimes share a slope with puffins. Their digging can break into a puffin chamber and cost the puffin its egg. Puffins are monogamous, mating for life, and both parents care for the young. The male spends more time guarding and maintaining the nest, while the female does more of the incubating and feeding.

  Laying begins in April in the more southerly colonies, but it seldom happens before June in Greenland. The female lays a single white egg each year, and if it is lost early she may produce another. Birds in adjacent burrows tend to lay at the same time. The egg is large for the bird, averaging 61 millimetres long and 42 wide and weighing about 62 grams. The shell is usually unmarked but soon gets covered in mud. Each parent has two feather-free brood patches where extra blood flow warms the egg. The bird on duty in the dark chamber spends much of its time asleep with its head tucked under a wing. Now and then it steps out to flap dust from its feathers or take a short flight down to the sea.

  Above ground the colony is quiet, but inside a burrow the puffin makes a growl that somewhat resembles a chainsaw being revved up.

  Incubation lasts around 39 to 45 days. The first sign of hatching, seen from outside, is an adult arriving with a beak full of fish. For the first few days the chick may be fed beak to beak, and afterwards the fish are simply dropped beside it, and it swallows them whole. The chick is covered in fluffy black down, with open eyes, and it can stand at once. It weighs about 42 grams at first and gains roughly 10 grams a day.

  Observers have watched a nest chamber from an underground hide with a peephole. Between parental visits the chick sleeps a great deal, and it also exercises. It rearranges nesting material, picks up and drops small stones, flaps its stubby wings, tugs at protruding root ends and pushes against the burrow wall. It goes to the entrance or a side tunnel to defecate. It even seems to anticipate an arriving adult, moving along the burrow shortly before the parent appears, then retreating to the nest chamber when the fish are delivered.

  Hunting areas are often 100 kilometres or more from the nest, though birds feeding chicks go only about half that distance. What the chick eats varies by place. In the Shetland Islands, sand eels normally make up at least 90% of the food brought to chicks, and when sand eels were scarce, many chicks starved. In Norway the staple is herring, and when herring numbers dwindled, so did the puffins. In Labrador the birds proved more flexible. When capelin declined, they switched to other prey and kept the chicks fed.

  Chicks take from 34 to 50 days to fledge, depending on food, though the normal range is 38 to 44 days. By then a chick has reached about 75% of its adult weight. It avoids light until nearly fledged and rarely emerges into the open. Fish deliveries taper off in the last days, but the chick is not abandoned the way a Manx shearwater chick is. Adults have even been seen provisioning a nest after the chick had left. During those last days the chick sheds its down and shows juvenile plumage.

  The departure happens at night, when predation risk is lowest. The chick comes out of the burrow, usually for the first time, and walks, runs and flaps its way to the sea. It cannot fly properly yet, so a cliff descent is perilous. Once on the water it paddles out, and by daybreak it may be 3 kilometres from shore. It does not join other puffins and does not return to land for 2 to 3 years.

  6312353433

• 6. Raiders and Thieves

  ›

  Seals have been known to kill puffins at sea, and large fish may do so too. At sea the danger comes mostly from below the surface, and puffins can sometimes be seen putting their heads underwater to look around for predators. On land the picture reverses. Most colonies sit on small islands, which is no coincidence. Such islands keep out foxes, rats, stoats, weasels, cats and dogs, so the main threats come from the sky.

  The great black-backed gull, Larus marinus, and the great skua, Stercorarius skua, are large enough to catch a puffin in flight or seize one that cannot escape fast enough on the ground. When danger appears, puffins fly down to the sea or retreat into their burrows. A caught bird fights back hard with its beak and sharp claws. The wheeling flocks beside the cliffs help, because a predator focused on a single bird has a hard time, while any bird isolated on the ground is far more exposed.

  Smaller gulls, including the herring gull, Larus argentatus, and the lesser black-backed gull, can hardly bring down a healthy adult. Instead they stride through the colony taking eggs that have rolled toward burrow entrances and newly hatched chicks that wander too close to daylight. They also steal fish from puffins coming home to feed their young.

  The Arctic skua, Stercorarius parasiticus, behaves differently depending on where it lives. On the tundra of the far north it hunts on the ground. At lower latitudes it is a specialised kleptoparasite that targets auks and other seabirds. It harasses a puffin in the air until the puffin drops its catch, then snatches the fish. Puffins seem to blunt these attacks by returning to the colony in groups, and arriving together also reduces predation by great skuas.

  The bird's nests also host small parasites. The guillemot tick, Ixodes uriae, and the flea Ornithopsylla laetitiae, probably a rabbit flea originally, have both been recorded in puffin nests. Other fleas on the birds include Ceratophyllus borealis, Ceratophyllus gallinae, Ceratophyllus garei and Ceratophyllus vagabunda. One of them is Spilopsyllus cuniculi, the common rabbit flea.

  3738126335

• 7. Falling Numbers

  ›

  In 2015 the International Union for Conservation of Nature moved the Atlantic puffin from least concern to vulnerable. A review had found a rapid and continuing decline across its European range. Trends elsewhere are unknown, although in 2018 the global population was estimated at 12 to 14 million adults. In the same year BirdLife International reported that the species was threatened with extinction.

  The causes are probably several. They include more predation by gulls and skuas, rats, cats, dogs and foxes introduced to nesting islands, contamination by toxic residues, drowning in fishing nets, shrinking food supplies and climate change.

  On the island of Lundy, puffins fell from 3,500 pairs in 1939 to 10 pairs in 2000, mainly because rats multiplied and ate eggs and young chicks. After the rats were eliminated, recovery was expected. In 2005 a juvenile was seen, believed to be the first chick raised on the island in 30 years. Skomer, off Pembrokeshire in west Wales, tells a happier story. More than 43,000 puffins live there, making it one of Britain's most important colonies, and their numbers have risen every year since predators were removed.

  Puffin numbers also climbed in the late 20th century in the North Sea. On the Isle of May, only five pairs bred in 1958, while 20 years later there were 10,000 pairs. On the Farne Islands the count grew about 10% per year, and nearly 40,000 pairs were recorded in the 2013 breeding season. That count was a slight rise on the 2008 census and on the previous year's poor season, when some burrows flooded.

  Since 2000, however, sharp declines have been seen in Iceland, Norway, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. The United Kingdom shows a similar pattern, with the rise of 1969-2000 apparently reversed. The Fair Isle colony was estimated at 20,200 individuals in 1986 and had almost halved by 2012. If current trends hold, the European population will fall by an estimated 50-79% between 2000 and 2065.

  Oil is a threat, because puffins winter on the open ocean. Oiled plumage insulates poorly, leaving a bird vulnerable to temperature swings and less buoyant. Birds that preen to remove oil swallow and inhale toxins, causing inflamed airways and guts and, later, damage to the liver and kidneys. That harm can reduce breeding success and injure developing embryos. A winter spill far out at sea may affect puffins less than inshore birds, since waves break up the slicks. When oiled auks wash up on beaches, only about 1.5% are puffins, but many more may have died far from land and sunk. After the wreck of the oil tanker SS Torrey Canyon in 1967, few dead puffins were found. Yet the number breeding in France the following year had fallen to 16% of its previous level.

  Because puffins sit high in the food chain, they are also good indicators of environmental health. Heavy metals and other pollutants concentrate as they move up from prey to predator, and fish-eating puffins can accumulate mercury and arsenic. Scientists can measure these in eggs, feathers or internal organs. Beached bird surveys with chemical analysis of feathers can reveal marine pollution, and fingerprinting techniques can even produce evidence suitable for prosecuting offenders.

  Climate change adds another layer. In northern Norway the main food for chicks is young herring. The survival of newly hatched herring larvae in the previous year depended on water temperature, which controlled plankton abundance, which in turn shaped the growth of first-year herring. Puffin breeding success has been found to track the previous year's sea surface temperature in exactly this way. Warmer water may even benefit some northern colonies.

  In Maine the news is worse. Shifting fish populations linked to sea temperature are blamed for a shortage of herring, the local staple. Some adults have become emaciated and died. Others brought butterfish, Peprilus triacanthus, to the nest, but these fish are often too large and deep-bodied for a chick to swallow, so the chick starves. Maine lies on the southern edge of the breeding range, and changing weather patterns may push that edge northward.

  142404357

• 8. People and Puffins

  ›

  In 1973, Stephen W. Kress of the National Audubon Society launched Project Puffin to bring puffins back to nesting islands in the Gulf of Maine. Eastern Egg Rock Island in Muscongus Bay, about 6 miles from Pemaquid Point, had held nesting puffins until 1885, when overhunting wiped them out. Kress's team relied on the fact that young puffins usually return to breed on the island where they fledged. Biologists and volunteers moved nestlings aged 10 to 14 days from Great Island in Newfoundland to Eastern Egg Rock. The chicks lived in artificial sod burrows and were fed vitamin-fortified fish daily for about one month. Every chick was tagged before fledging. The translocations continued yearly until 1986, with 954 young puffins moved in total.

  The first adults came back by 1977. Decoys had been set out to suggest an established colony, but at first they achieved little. In 1981 four pairs nested, and 2014 counts found 148 nesting pairs. The project proved that a seabird colony can be re-established. It also showed that decoys, and later call recordings and mirrors, can help.

  Across the Atlantic, SOS Puffin is a project of the Scottish Seabird Centre at North Berwick to save puffins on islands in the Firth of Forth. Craigleith was once among the largest colonies in Scotland, with 28,000 pairs, but numbers there have dropped to just a few thousand. The culprit is the tree mallow, Lavatera arborea, an introduced plant that has spread across the island in dense thickets and blocks the birds from burrowing. More than 700 volunteers have backed the project, cutting back the plants, and puffins are returning to breed in greater numbers. The centre has another request for the public. In late summer, motorists should check under their cars before driving off, because young puffins confused by street lights may land in town and shelter beneath vehicles.

  Puffins have long been a source of food. People caught them to eat fresh, salted in brine, or smoked and dried. Their feathers went into bedding, and their eggs were eaten too, though less than those of other seabirds, since the eggs are hard to extract from burrows. Most countries now protect the bird by law, and where hunting is still allowed, strict rules prevent overexploitation. Iceland and the Faroe Islands still permit it, despite calls for an outright ban in Iceland.

  In the Westman Islands, where about half of Iceland's puffins breed, overharvesting around 1900 almost drove the birds to extinction. A 30-year hunting ban followed. When stocks recovered, a different harvesting method was adopted and the hunt is now kept at a sustainable level. A further ban across all of Iceland was requested in 2011, though the failing breeding success was being blamed on a thinner food supply rather than hunting.

  Traditional capture methods were ingenious. In the Faroe Islands the method of choice was fleyg, using a fleygingarstong, a pole 3.6 metres long with a small net suspended between two rods. A few dead puffins were scattered to lure incoming birds, and the hunter flicked the net upward to scoop a bird out of the air as it slowed to land. Hunters often hid in stone seats built into small hollows on cliff tops. Most birds caught were subadults, and a skilled hunter could take 200 to 300 in a day. In St Kilda, hunters pushed a flexible pole with a noose on the end along the ground. The curious puffin advanced to inspect it, and a flick of the wrist dropped the noose over its head.

  Today, living puffins draw visitors. Around 4,000 puffins nest each year on islands off Maine, and tour boats take people to see them during summer. The Project Puffin Visitor Center in Rockland, run by the National Audubon Society, explains the birds' lives and other conservation work. Live cameras show the colony on Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge in the breeding season. Similar tours run in Iceland, the Hebrides and Newfoundland.

  The bird has also left its mark on culture. It is the official bird of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In August 2007, Michael Ignatieff, deputy leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, proposed it as the party's symbol after watching a colony and becoming fascinated by its behaviour. The proposal failed. The municipality of Værøy in Norway has a puffin on its coat of arms. Informal names include clown of the sea and sea parrot, and young birds are sometimes called pufflings.

  Lundy in the United Kingdom is reputed to take its name from the Norse lund-ey, meaning puffin island. Another explanation links lund to a copse or wooded area, and suggests Vikings found the island a useful refuge and restocking point after raids on the mainland. Lundy issued its own coins, and in 1929 its own stamps, with values given in puffins. Many other places have put the bird on stamps, including Alderney, Canada, the Faroe Islands, France, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Iceland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Slovenia, St Pierre et Miquelon and the United Kingdom.

  In 1939, the paperback publisher Penguin Books launched a children's line under the Puffin Books brand. It began with nonfiction and soon added fiction by well-known authors. Demand was so strong that Puffin Book Clubs were set up in schools and a children's magazine, Puffin Post, was founded.

  On the Icelandic island of Heimaey, children traditionally rescue young puffins. Fledglings leaving their nests sometimes get confused, perhaps by street lighting, and land in the village. The children collect them and release them toward the sea. The custom is recorded in Bruce McMillan's photo-illustrated children's book Nights of the Pufflings, published in 1995.

  Puffins even reached a galaxy far away. Because the birds are protected on Skellig Michael, the production team for the Star Wars sequel trilogy was not allowed to disturb them during filming, and so had to keep them in frame. The crew dressed the puffins up digitally, and recreated them practically and digitally for other scenes. The result was the creation of porgs.

  4928476465