Fun Facts About The Atlantic Puffin

Atlantic puffins spend the majority of their existence in a marine environment. While they navigate the skies like other birds, they also perform a kind of aquatic "flight," propelling themselves underwater using their wings as powerful flippers. As they swim, their webbed feet function like a rudder, providing precise steering and direction.

Their diet consists of small fish, including sand eels and herring, which they pursue and capture beneath the waves. A typical dive lasts 30 seconds or less, yet they are capable of reaching depths of 200 feet and can remain submerged for nearly a full minute.

Excellently equipped for their aquatic life, puffins are also remarkably fast in flight. They can beat their wings at an incredible rate of 400 times per minute, achieving airborne speeds of 55 miles per hour—comparable to highway traffic.

As puffins reach adulthood, their beaks and feet undergo a striking transformation, turning from a muted gray to a vibrant orange.

During the spring and summer months, countless puffins congregate in vast colonies along North Atlantic coasts and islands. This social nesting offers protection, reducing the risk of predation from herring gulls that patrol the skies. Between four and six years of age, puffins form breeding pairs that typically last a lifetime, with partners reuniting at the same breeding site each year. They display pair-bonding behaviors such as gently rubbing and tapping their beaks together. These couples frequently return to and reuse the same nesting burrow from previous seasons.

Employing their stout beaks and sharp claws, puffins excavate burrows in the space between large rocks or within narrow fissures. They prepare the nest by lining it with soft feathers and grass before the female lays a single egg, which is incubated for approximately 42 days.

A baby puffin, known as a chick or puffling, resembles a small, downy ball of fluff upon hatching. As it matures, it develops strong, sleek feathers essential for swimming and flying.

After about 45 days in their island burrows, the young pufflings venture out to sea. They will not return to land until they themselves are ready to breed, several years later.

Raising a puffling demands a constant supply of food, requiring both parents to provide fish. A single parent may execute up to 276 dives in one day, often carrying back loads of ten fish or more. The puffling consumes the fish whole, always swallowing them head-first. By the time the young bird fledges, each parent will have made an astounding 12,420 feeding dives.

Fun Facts About The Atlantic Puffin

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