environment

An excerpt on Puffins from “Message in a Bottle”

” Puffins, like all seabirds, spend their lives on the open ocean, coming to land only to breed for a few short months in summer. Built exquisitely for a life at sea, they shed the colorful plates on their bill in fall and get down to the serious business of surviving a winter on the North Atlantic. Their wings are short, designed for swimming efficiency. They can dive to depths greater than a hundred metres searching for capelin and other small fish, leaving behind a trail of air bubbles like fairy dust. Their feet are set far back on their bodies, rudders for agile manoeuvrability.  Under water, they are elegant and masterful. Not so, above. The short wings are almost useless for flight, the wingbeat fast and frantic, just few beats away from falling out of the air altogether. “

” In late winter the bright blue, yellow and orange plates are replaced, looking resplendent, proclaiming Look at me! Fresh feathers like a new coat of paint. Summer is all about courtship, breeding and raising young. Barring disaster, a pair of puffins will remain together, sharing the same burrow year after year. Singles search for a mate and come to land to lay claim to an unoccupied burrow, if they’re lucky, or a piece of turf to dig a new one. The first few weeks are spent getting reacquainted, clapping bills together, bowing heads to the ground, re-establishing their bond after the full winter apart. At the same time, they are also busy digging and repairing their burrow, using their colourful bills as trowels, small flame-orange webbed feet as shovels, flicking dirt in small sprays out of the entrance. A rudimentary nest of a few strands of grass is built deep within one chamber of the burrow, and in it a single egg is laid. A second chamber is used as a latrine. Both parents take turns incubating the egg and feeding the chick until it is ready to head out to sea for the first time by itself.”