A Puffin Piece

In the Arctic there is a bird that looks like it face-planted in a clown’s make-up kit. People love to see this bird and when I was on my expedition there was quite the talk about whether or not we would find them. It turns out that on our rainy last afternoon we did finally get to see a small Atlantic Puffin colony on the rocky coast of Spitsbergen. I think these were some of the summer’s last hold outs who would soon be making their way south, but they were kind enough to stick around for us to go and see them.

We cruised along a rocky stretch of coastline in the rain where the puffins were hanging out. About half of them perched on the rocky ledges while the other half clumsily flew around and swam in the water. They didn’t seem to be bothered by zodiacs full of photographers in the least bit, so we got to take our time floating around shooting photos. I have often seen photos of puffins with little fishes in their beaks, but none of the puffins I saw seemed to be very good at catching fish on this day.

They did seem to be more at home on the water than clumsily waddling around on a rocky ledge. It was a gray rainy afternoon, so focusing wasn’t 100% accurate and I was shooting at a relatively high ISO. Most of the photos I have here are cropped and have the noise reduction applied in Lightroom.

In addition to these sad clowns of the bird family, there was some excitement overhead as a couple of birds seemed to be having a strong disagreement about something. I spent a couple of minutes trying to photograph this arial fight. It was happening so fast, that I had a lot of difficulty tracking and staying focused on the birds. It seemed like they were both attacking each other and I couldn’t tell who the more aggressive bird was, but it was interesting to watch. After a while, they seemed to have enough of each other and moved on with their bird lives. In the photo below the sky was solid gray so I just bumped the exposure way up to get a look at the birds.

So, reindeer, whales, polar bears, walruses, puffins, … I was only missing an arctic fox on the wildlife list. But alas, I only got to hear about foxes that other people saw. Still, I got to see a lot of wildlife visiting such a cold and barren land. Thanks for reading.

20 thoughts on “A Puffin Piece”

  1. So many cute “clowns” not sad ones. 😉 I like the pic on the rocky ledge where one puffin is looking up. I wonder what it is he sees.
    My favorite one is the puffin in the water spreading its wings. All of them are great! The only better thing would be seeing them in person.
    Haha, on the fighting birds. Too bad you couldn’t interpret their squawks. Maybe they wanted to get your attention and be photographed too. It looks like it worked. 🙂

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  2. I like the title you gave this post. Very punny.

    I think puffins are beautiful birds, though kind of odd looking. And I think you did a great job capturing them in your photos. The mid-air squabble looks interesting. We see that out here, when crows attack hawks. The hawks have to climb higher and higher until they get out of range of the pesky crows.

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