Puffins Are Living On The Edge

Nature’s endearing, dogged survivors are not faring so well in the face of the latest environmental threats

- Jim Crumley

NOTHING about puffins is ordinary. Here is one coming in to land on a rock not five yards from where I stand on the Isle of May. I’m standing still, but even so, I’m six feet tall and not at all rock-like, but it seems hell-bent on landing there anyway.

It comes at me head-on, and in its final gesture just before touchdown it throws its wings wide – if you have never seen a puffin up close, they are surprisingly small – with a pronounced upwards curve.

In this attitude, its head appears to have slipped below the level of its shoulders, so the effect is of a vivid white owlish face ringed by a black collar, the whole rakishly divided by the reddish-orange slash of its extraordinary bill. From this perspective, it is essentially a white bird, terminated with a black arc of widely flourished tail feathers. Outrageously orange legs and webbed feet set off the astonishing moment.

It lands, stands, looks around, thrashes its wings at nothing in particular, calms down, turns sideways and in an instant transforms into the bird we all know and love; the sea parrot, the clown, the tammie norrie. The rock where it has landed has a little step towards its seaward edge, a foot long, a few inches deep. The puffin subsides onto that step and folds itself in such a way that it perfectly fills the shape of the step, as if a loose part of the landscape had just been ushered back into place.

Ten yards away, another puffin whirrs in on blurred wings, its bill full of fish. I say full, but in reality it isn’t. It is carrying three fish sideways, arranged so that the tail of the one in the middle is on the opposite side from the tails of those at the front and back. Three fish do not amount to a mouthful for a puffin – seven or eight do, always arranged head-to-tail alternately.