Lorne,
Let me tell you about Puffins. I've seen a few of the other
animals and
birds on your list, but that are just tourist sightings, although wonderful
in their way.
But the Atlantic Puffin Fratercula arctica (The little Arctic
brother---probably meaning a frater, i.e. a catholic monk) is maybe the
most common seabird in my 'native' N.Norway, and I have seen the other two
species as well; the Crested Puffin Lunda cirrhata is if possible still
weirder than our Atlantic species.
Puffins are colonial seabirds, that congregate in colonies of
from some
hundreds to hundreds of thousands pairs. In contradistinction to the auks,
Puffins nest underground, either in self-dug burrows in grassy peat slopes,
or in the interstices among the stones of stony sloping cliffs. They lay
one egg, and the young is fed by both parents until able to fly--this
process can take anywhere from a month to 6 weeks, depending upon the
amount of food that the parents are able to find and the distance they have
to fly with it. Many places in N.Norway we have had heart-breaking
tragedies year after year, with all the young begging loudly and piteously
for many days, before finally starving. But adult Puffins are very
long-lived birds, and their life strategy is geared on the fact that young
are reared only in some seasons.
Puffins look quite clownesque on land, with their large
multicoloured
beaks, their dark 'coats' and their half upright stance. When you go
puffin-ringing, you'll learn quickly that they are not exactly adorable;
they can, and will, inflict a lot of damage both with the parrot-bill, and
also with the sharp and strong claws on the webbed feet that are otherwise
used for digging.
When you visit a puffin colony, you may be lucky and find a lot
of the
off-duty birds outside the nest burrows loafing, which is an unforgettable
sight indeed. But on other days scarcely a Puffin is to be seen, apart from
the birds flying off and on with food, and disappearing rapidly into the
burrows. At sea the birds float around and usually escape by diving at the
last moment. In flight they are unmistakable with their large heads, made
still larger-looking by this remarkable parrot-bill. By the way, large
parts of the bill-plates are shed in the fall, so the puffins look less
outrageous in winter; but then most of them are anyway out of sight of land.
As I said, Puffins are still very common in the NE Atlantic,
with Iceland
and N.Norway as two centres of distribution. In the Arctic there is a
larger subspecies grabae, but that is much less common, possibly because
there it is hard to find suitable nesting places.
Wim Vader, Tromsoe Museum
9037 Tromsoe, Norway
until 15 June UCC, Zoology
Lee Maltings, Prospect Row
Cork, Ireland
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