Puffin

 

The Atlantic Puffin (Fratercula arctica) is a medium-sized, stout seabird with a short neck, a big head, and a large, triangular bill. Breeding birds have a black, orange, and yellow bill. The bill grows larger and acquires more grooves as the bird ages. 

Atlantic puffins are birds that live at sea most of their lives. Puffins have fairly short, straight wings and fly with constant, fast wingbeats. They flap their wings up to 400 times a minute, speeding along in the air at 55 miles an hour, as fast as a car on a highway. 

Puffins stand upright on land and float quite easily on water, using their wings as paddles. As they swim, they use their webbed feet to steer, much as a boat uses a rudder. 

Puffins eat small fish, such as sand eels and herring, which they hunt underwater. They generally stay underwater for 30 seconds or less, and can dive 200 feet deep and stay down for up to a minute.

Puffins spend most of their lives bobbing on the ocean and diving after small fish, and come ashore to breed on rocky and sparsely vegetated islands and sea cliffs. 

A baby puffin is known as a chick or puffling. A puffling eats so much food that both the mother and father have to supply it with fish. In a single day, a parent may dive 276 times, bringing back 10 fish each time. The puffling swallows the fish head first and whole. By the time the puffling leaves its burrow, each parent will have dove 12,420 times.

But their cute looks belie their brutal life struggles. Skuas, Great black-backed gulls and Herring gulls are masters at kleptoparasitism — stealing food from other birds. 

Worse still, these predatory birds eat the young ones and are not afraid to sneak up and make a meal of an unsuspecting adult, too.

Life’s not fair when you are a puffin. 

If you ain't huffin', you ain't a puffin