Puffins Puffins Puffins

I love puffins. We have seen them before, but only from a boat… far away. It barely counts. So while in Scotland, we took the opportunity to do a puffin excursion from the Isle of Mull to Lunga, a small uninhabited island with a large puffin colony.

We were able to get off the ship and walk on to the island and watch these funny little birds going about their business. It was so wonderful to be so close to them and be able to witness their cute antics up close and personal.

The Atlantic puffin spends most of its life at sea. They come ashore from May through August to mate, have their chicks, feed them to nourish them for a life back out at sea. We watched as large birds flew over, as they scampered into their burrows.

Puffins usually pair up with the same partner as previous years – some may have been together for 20 years. The puffins dig their burrows with their beak, and line it with grass, to have their pufflings. Both mates take turn incubating the egg for 36 – 45 days. The puffin only lay one egg per breeding season.

The parents fish for sand eels to feed their chicks until the puffling are big enough to ‘fledge’ or leave the nest. Once the pufflings are born, the puffins have to stave off the savages of seagulls quick to steal their mouthful of sand eels to feed their young.

The lack of sand eels currently endangers the puffin population. Overfishing threatens the sand eels targetted by industrial fishing operations using large quantities for fishmeal and fish oil.

Once they go out to sea, their bright orange beak changes color to a gray-black, to camouflage them at sea.

We just loved watching the little guys, nicknamed, ‘clowns of the sea’, as they awkwardly scurried around, and flew in and out. They looked like little stuffed animals. It was a truly special experience.