Birds and Birding's Guide to:

Watching THE PLOVER-LIKE BIRDS

THE GULLS AND THEIR ALLIES

Puffin Species

The present family numbers about a dozen genera and some thirty species, and is evidently of considerable antiquity, as several fossil forms have been found in the middle and later Tertiary. It is capable of division into two not very sharply defined subfamilies, — the Fraterculinm, which embraces the Puffins and Anklets, and the Alcinm, or typical Auks, Murres, and Guillemots.

We may first consider the Puffins, or Sea Parrots, which are certainly the most grotesque and in many respects the most interesting in the entire group. They are chiefly remarkable for the high, extremely compressed, grooved, and brilliantly colored bill, which seems altogether too large for the size of the body, as may be seen from the accompanying figures, and, moreover, it was discovered a few years ago that portions of the bill are regularly shed at the close of the nesting season, so that in winter the bill is quite different from its summer appearance. ''

By examining the bill of nesting birds,”says Dr. Stejneger,”we find that it consists of two quite differently colored parts, — a terminal one, with several transverse grooves, and a basal, purplish, yellow, or green part separated from the former by a furrow, and again subdivided by other furrows into several distinct pieces. Toward the end of the nesting season the furrows between the plates become deeper, until finally they are entirely detached, when they fall off, giving place to a brownish soft membrane.”In the Tuftet Puffin (Lunda cirrhata) there are even processes around the eyes which are deciduous like the portions of the bill.

Of the four species of Puffin known in this country, three are found in the North Pacific and one in the North Atlantic. They are rather small birds from eleven to fifteen inches long, and quite uniform black or sooty black above and white or sooty grayish beneath. They are gregarious at all seasons of the year, but especially so during the nesting time, which is mainly June and July. The single white, sometimes faintly brownish spotted egg is deposited either in a burrow excavated by the birds themselves, or in deep crevices among the rocks. Their food consists largely of fish-eggs, crustaceans, etc.

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