271 : Puffin

Puffin - Fratercula artica

I am having one of my guilt ridden weekends alone where I realise that I have completely drifted away from The Task - despite having a laptop full of birds photos 2013 is looking pretty dire in terms of progress. If this was the Daly Bird we would be looking at something like 7-800 birds posted on this site by now. Its all just time. A post can take me an hour dependant on the bird.

But its easy to pick up and I have 300 to push for and the century retrospective in which I might allow myself a Top 15 !!

So what a bird today !!

Above a very poor picture of 5 sad Puffins on Bempton Cliffs taken abut a month ago when I had a weekend trip back to the UK to see Jane and the boys. We have better photos in the house but none taken by me or with me present - Puffins in line ups, Puffins with purple heather in their mouths and shiny fish, Puffins dancing in the sunlight. All taken by Jane on family pilgrimages to Mull. I will definitely have to come back to this post in the future given that these are one of Britain's best looking and best loved birds. Truly the Sea Parrot. I have to make my trip to Mull one of these days so that Puffins can be properly shared.

Quite a lot of people haven't seen a Puffin. It does require a trip to a breeding colony as in the Winter they simply melt away into the ocean. They are much smaller than people realise - perhaps just the size of a 1 pint milk bottle. When they fly they give the appearance of a bumblebee with whirring wings. You cannot see the detail on the faces here so I've blown up one slightly blurred picture to give a better view.

Its the red, yellow and blue banded beak, yellow gape with its downturned smile and the blue detailing around the eye like a clown's makeup that lift the bird from another black and white Auk to something approaching a living relative. And the calls - the "Ohh ! s and Ahh ! s". There can be nothing sadder in the world than a Puffin at times. Bewildered, resigned, stoic - loved ! Ohh ! Ahh !

Clown wasn't the first comparison drawn. The latin name Fratercula means little Friar. They would have associated with the cold windswept islands where hermitages abound and the overall plumage does have something clerical about it. So little monks they are in their North Atlantic or North Sea Hermitages.

Puffins nest in burrows on grassy slopes. And here's a Puffin fact thats slightly odd. The chick is housed at the end of a tunnel slightly longer than a man's arm and is fed for the first few weeks in darkness. Parents and chick never see each other and after the adults abandon the chick it makes its own way out of the burrow and into the world. It consequently never sees its parents. Its first flight down to the sea is taken and alone its first attempts at fishing and so on. It will never recognise or know its parents in the same way that a duckling or even a small ostrich might in the safety of a creche for the first couple of months.

So its the sad comical bird that made its own way into the world to stand looking out to sea - perhaps they are looking for Mum and Dad and never quite got over that sense of loss. Or perhaps we layer too much pathos on these little tubby characters because nature has dealt them an oversupply of charm because of their looks and lifestyle.

There are a million pairs still in the British Isles but they are moving North following the sand eels who are also moving North. There have been tales of Puffins choking their young trying to feed them pipefish and other fish unsuitable for small beaks. They have had a good year in 2013 by all accounts but their have been some bad year's in recent history. For some reason some of the press in the UK wants to deny climate change. As a birder I can tell you that Puffins leaving and Little Egrets arriving is as good a sign as anything. Cetti's warbler - there's another one - even Bea eaters seeking out nests in quarries. It might be a degrees difference in the waters around the UK but it has a significant effect on the fish. There was a bloke I used to talk to in Manchester at the rugby club who had a little boat on the North Wales Coast - Aversock I think. He had always been fishing with his father and so on there. He told me he could track the arrival of different fish that he'd never caught as a boy - types of bream and things further North than they were usually found. So thats a birder and a fisherman. I guess an oil company or Daily Mail columnist cannot look at the same data - or its all just a natural cycle. We'll see won't we in my lifetime  one way or the other if some scientists are right. As long as there is room for Puffins somewhere.

Puffin, Fratercula artica
Bempton RSPB, North Yorkshire
July 2013