Yesterday a friend and I went on a boat trip from Dunbar to the Isle of May. We had timed it for peak puffin season and we weren’t disappointed! There were tens of thousands of puffins on land and sea around the island. Many were busy bringing in sand eels to their hidden “puffling” chicks in the burrows.
Some collective terms for groups of puffins include a “parliament” and a “circus”. We saw many such parliaments!
This group were all perched along the wall of a ruined building.
One of the paths we took led to the edge of a cliff where we could get really up close to the puffins and they were unperturbed by human presence. Here are some close up photographs of them.
Just look at that extraordinary beak!
We were told that apparently the record number of sand eels held in a puffin’s beak is 80! I wonder how anyone counted that.
Not all puffins could hang around with the sand eels in their mouths. There were some gulls waiting by the burrows and we saw one attempt to steal the catch from an incoming puffin which this time sped fast enough past it.
At the end of our visit it started to rain. The puffins spend most of their lives out at sea and only come on land a few months in the breeding season where each pair will raise a single puffling. When fledging the pufflings leave their burrows to go into the sea at night time. There are too many predators about in the daytime.
Three hours on the island went far too fast and we had to bid farewell to this puffin paradise. What a privilege it had been to be amongst them all.
Sarah's Wildlife Watch 