By: Arin
I spent almost 3 weeks in Svalbard over the summer of 2018, working indeterminately with seabirds as the weather came and went in its allowance of our passage. The rain, fog, and wind kept us at bay long enough for me to knit half a sweater sleeve before the day we finally woke up to a mirror still ocean and a clear path to the puffin colony. The little rocky island hosts one of the few Atlantic puffin colonies in the high arctic and the most northern puffin population in the world. Getting there required a 30 min ride in a small boat across the fjord in a cumbersome yet warm survival suit, the arctic's life jacket.
The Svalbard Atlantic puffins are bigger than the northern Norway Atlantic puffins, and in fact are considered a subspecies, and much bigger than the horned and crested puffins of the Pacific ocean. They have huge orange parrot-like beaks (their Danish name actually means sea parrot) and clawed orange feet, which it seems they mainly use for scratching well-meaning biologists (also digging burrows). Most of my team already had old wounds and scars from working with puffins, and I too got a hard bite the second time I held an adult. Unlike the other alcids (birds in the puffin, murre, and guillemot family), whose bites were so tame as to be almost cute, the puffins did not appreciate being handled and fought back hard. Fortunately my first day I was working with their much more gentle chicks. Most puffin species dig burrows for theirs nests, but on Svalbard the soil is sparse and frozen so they build their nests in the crevices between rocks on the shore, lining them with dead grass, feathers, and bits of trash.
The chicks are charcoal gray, and when I was there some were already developing the white breast feathers of most alcids. They peeped in protest when I reached my arm, sometimes all the way to the shoulder, into their little tunnels to gently pick them up. I quickly took their measurements, quietly telling them it was for science and for their own good in the long run. One chick angrily bit me every time I reached for her, making me both annoyed and proud; she was well on her way to becoming an irritable adult. The adult puffins watched from the rocks above us, sometimes with 5 inch long herring hanging out of their beaks and the perpetually worried expression given by the blue triangular markings surrounding their eyes.
They are curious birds, and would fly in towards our boat and low over our heads, investigating the newcomers. Curiosity is an often-rewarded trait in the arctic and shared amongst most of the fauna. When food is scarce, being inquisitive and brave can sometimes get you a meal. The puffins floated in massive rafts in the ocean in front of the colony, bobbing with their bright orange beaks contrasted against the blue while the mist rolled in.
Atlantic puffins really are amazing birds. They can live up to 40 years old in the wild and dig burrows on ocean islands scattered across the northern Atlantic. They can be found in the UK, Norway, USA, Russia, Iceland, Spain, and the Faroe islands, which are located between Iceland and Scotland. They can fly a little over 50 mph using their short stubby wings, which are more adapted to swimming than flight. They are often monogamous, seeking out the same mate from year to year. While their winter whereabouts are unknown, it is thought that they gather in massive rafts in the open ocean, and float together for months. Their bills turn large and orange for breeding season and you can determine their age by their bill ridges. As fall approaches they shed portions of their bill and their white face masks darken to a dusty dark gray for winter (The Puffin, M.P. Harris).
Puffins and other alcids are also the original penguins. The now extinct great auk used to exist in great numbers along the Atlantic coasts. standing 30 inches tall (75 cm), it was the largest alcid and dubbed a penguin by sailors, who applied the same name to the similar looking flightless birds described centuries later in the southern hemisphere. Sadly, the great auk was hunted to extinction by 1844, but the remaining alcids, murres (guillemots), little auks, and puffins, also bear the penguin-like coat of black back and white breast. This coloration is common among water dwelling creatures and can be found in most fish, whales, and dolphins as well, blending in with the dark water when seen from above and white with the sunlight from below. Penguins and alcids also fill the same ecological niche in their respective ecosystems, and consequently there are no penguins in the northern hemisphere and no alcids in the southern hemisphere.
Despite their resemblance to penguins, all alcids can fly, albeit not gracefully. It is funny to watch them in the cliffs as they fly in and stand erect like a penguin would, but flap maniacally as they slip on their perch. Their wings are as short as possible for swimming while also maintaining the ability to fly, as they spend a majority of their life on the water. Despite this, they are considered strong fliers, and can flap their wings up to 400 times per minute and look almost like hummingbirds when they try to land. Taking off is hard though. They launch themselves off cliffs and run across the water for several seconds before lifting off from the sea. When we finished banding a puffin (affixing harmless metal and/or plastic bands to their legs for research purposes) we had to use both hands to launch them as high as we could into the air to release them, giving them enough lift to soar out over the water with ruffled dignity and a new band on their leg so we could monitor their populations in the face of climate change and pollution.
Upon returning to mainland Norway after the field season, I had the daunting task of going through some 35,000 game cam photographs and so was able to watch a stop motion like film of the puffin's doings in front of their nest caves. While several thousand were simply ones of the parents messing around in front of the nest or sleeping in the entrance, One series in particular told a little story: one parent playing with a gull feather in the rocks before presenting it to his mate in the nest. They clack beaks briefly, a sign of affection akin to a kiss, before she accepts the feather and the pair return to the hard mission of raising a chick in the beautiful yet unforgiving arctic waters.
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