Scotland. Of puffins and bird stereotypes
‘That is a glimpse of the ocean bird, not on display but somehow private to itself... an animal whose life stands outside the cuteness in which we want to envelop it.’ (A. Nicolson, The Seabird’s Cry)
This might sound like a complicated story. Either that, or I will make it sound complicated, while it’s in fact as simple as it gets. It’s the story of my first-ever encounter with puffins. As such, though, it’s also (and especially) the story of how stereotypes don’t work, not even when they point to something fitting or meaningful. They invariably flatten the complexity of the object they aim to describe, be it a behaviour, an occurrence or, as a matter of fact, an animal species.
It’s also the story of how birding is infinitely more complex than spotting and identifying birds. Few times I’ve been more aware of this than after my first time watching and photographing puffins on the Isle of May, a nature reserve located east of Edinburgh, where thousands of seabirds spend the nesting season every year.
While I’m happy to thank myself for wanting to learn more about puffins prior to my trip, I’m even happier to thank Adam Nicolson for telling me all about them in his stupendous The Seabird’s Cry, a delicate and scientifically accurate depiction of a number of seabird species he follows along their favourite coastlines. In the chapter about puffins, Nicolson does the two things I needed the most: share a ton of info about puffins’ life and behaviour and, by doing so, dismantle all the commonplaces that usually caption a puffin shot, which, I’m sure, I, too, must have repeatedly voiced in the past.
While stereotypes surely apply to many bird species, they largely affect the most common or popular. In this sense, puffins are no exception. Descriptions usually include references to their clownish appearance, awkward walk, and funny ‘habit’ of stuffing their bills with sandeel. They’re also invariably referred to as ‘cute’, as if they stood on grass or rocks doing nothing but stare ahead, like plush toys with no true purpose. Don’t get me wrong, I see where the ‘cuteness’ remarks come from and I have no doubt I fell for it myself, repeatedly. But after learning more about their behaviour and migration patterns, I won’t fall for it again.
In his The Seafarers, an evocative journey through British seascapes and their seabird populations, Stephen Rutt voices strong opinions against the anthropomorphism of animal species, and in so doing, he also briefly touches on the topic of ‘puffin stereotypes’. Writing about skuas in Shetland, he notes: ‘Every time a nature documentary shows a skua robbing a puffin of its fish, the instinct is to question the moral neutrality of nature. Puffins are presented as the hard-working, honest birds that we innately care about because they’re cute. The skuas are slandered. [...] It is wholly untrue. The narratives we apply to nature reflect our own biases; they are used to justify our own unrelated morals.’ His words resonate with me loudly. Puffins do ‘puffin things’ because they’re puffins, just as skuas do ‘skua things’ because they’re skuas. Nothing moral or malicious about it.
Before my trip I tried to summarise the ‘puffin facts’ from Nicolson’s book that crucially opened my eyes to the complexity of these birds and helped me abandon for good all stereotypes about them. Here are some of them.
Puffins arrive in the North Atlantic in spring. Their ancestors first got there about 5 million years ago. They came from the Pacific Ocean through the opening between the Americas. A couple of million years later, the sea gap closed, and the two oceans were forever parted. That’s also how the Gulf Stream was born and how, consequently, the Ice Ages era began. Today’s puffins come from afar, in time and space.
During the breeding season puffins live in colonies near the sea. Their characteristic orange bill and legs are not a permanent feature, unlike one might easily think. The colour appears at the end of winter, when puffins also don new flight feathers and fluffy breast feathers, which they use to incubate the egg. The richer in carotenoids the fish they eat, the brighter the shade of orange, the healthier their appearance, which also makes for the ideal partner and breeder.
I didn’t even know that most puffins mate for life. Every year they reunite with their partner and find their usual burrow, a 1-metre long ‘tunnel’ at the end of which they lay their eggs and raise their chick. The one egg each pair lays sits in the burrow for about six weeks before it hatches. When it does, the parents work tirelessly to make sure they feed their chick as best they can, till it’s ready to leave. When the puffling is ready, it leaves the burrow alone, at night, while its parents stay back at the colony for several days still. The puffling begins its puffin life by spending a few consecutive years out the sea.
As for the parents, they leave the colony at the end of summer, their plumage grey by then, their colours duller. Puffins spend the winter alone at sea along routes that are not exactly identical to the ones from the previous year, but approximately so. Each puffin sticks to recurrent personalised winter routes, which the bird grows increasingly familiar with after trying out random patterns over the first few years out at sea.
It was very empowering to read about puffins before going out to see them, because it allowed me to see them for what they really are: colony creatures, tireless parents, and unique individuals. I looked them in the eyes and saw the ocean waves pass through, the lengthy routes over the winter sea, the innate, effortless dedication to their family.
While going over my puffin photos at my desk, already nostalgic about the time spent on the island, I came across one shot I thought best portrayed the identity of these birds. It shows a puffin standing on a cliff edge, sandeel dangling from its bill, the sky white-grey all around. The bill is not visible, the orange legs don’t stand out in the shade of the frame. I took ‘better’ puffin photos that day, but this one shows how I see puffins now, now that I know more about them.
Puffins are extraordinary birds. ‘Cute’ doesn’t even begin to tell their story. And so I shall again borrow Nicolson’s words, which best sum up the true essence of puffins as they really are, not as ‘bird conventions’ see them: ‘Next time you sit among the puffins on a summer evening, looking at their elegance and anxiety, that is what to hold in mind: not clowns but beauties, Ice Age survivors, scholar-gypsies of the Atlantic, their mind on an everlasting swing between island and sea, burrow and voyage, parent and child, the oscillating nomad-master of an unpacific ocean.’
A special thank you to Adam Nicolson and Stephen Rutt, whose books have given me incomparable insights into the lives and journeys of seabirds I’ll never tire of learning more about.
