Tufted puffins

A tufted puffin.

Courtesy of Salish Sea School

This week George Walter and I are trading places. I’m writing a bird column today, and he’s writing a gardening column.  

This idea arose because last week we went on a boat tour from Anacortes to Smith Island to see Tufted Puffins, and I wanted to write about them so much I was about to burst. George agreed to the idea because he has some things he wants tell you about the magnificent rhododendrons in his yard. 

Tufted puffins are the silliest-looking birds ever. All the talents of Disney’s empire could not create anything sillier. Just looking at a photo of one is likely to make you chuckle. A relative describes them as akin to “a cross between a penguin and a toucan." Among the names for a group of puffins are a circus, a burrow, a puffinry, or an improbability. 

It’s hard to take them seriously. They must be among the most laughed at of all birds.  

 But Tufted puffins are tough. They’re tough enough to spend years at a time in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, far outside the borders of any human nation. They only show up on land during their breeding season. 

But wait, I’m getting ahead of the story. 

The Salish Sea School hosts three-hour tours from Anacortes out to Smith Island to see tufted puffins. The island, which is part of a wildlife refuge, is at the eastern end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. You can look west across the water from the island and imagine Mr. de Fuca piloting his ship straight toward you in 1592. 

The Salish Sea School boat holds 40 people, but our group totaled 34. It was led by Olivia Fross, the School’s Lead Field Staff and a passionate puffin fan, and Elizabeth Drozda, curriculum designer for various adult and kid classes and an all-round expert naturalist. She knows a lot about the difference in the weights of various color pigments in feathers, for instance. 

The puffins we’ve come to see are just past their breeding season, which is of course when both males’ and females’ feathers — and their amazing beaks — are at their showiest. Some were transitioning out of that breeding plumage; others were still dressed up. 

Olivia told us all about a developing drama among the puffins: Another species of puffin that lives in the far north Pacific had taken up with the group we would see. He was suspected to be exhibiting breeding behavior; he’d been circling around a female’s burrow.

He had not been seen entering the burrow, but most of the time, no one was watching. It was unheard of for a bird from his far north species to show up. That meant people were free to speculate about how and why this happened. Within minutes there were multiple theories in the group gathered on the boat’s bow. 

As we neared the island, we had to stay several hundred yards away, the rare horned puffin was sighted by a hard-core birder with a huge camera lens. (The puffin’s horns were small tufts of feathers.)

Several others, including Olivia, got it in their binocular sights and followed it. Cries of excitement rose from a dozen or so people on the bow of the boat. Then it got even better: the horned puffin started circling the burrow in the side of the cliff at the island’s edge. It circled again, and again! The excitement became more intense with every passing swoop. 

Keeping a fast-flying bird in sight with binoculars takes practice. Time after time watchers called out, “Oh, no, I lost it! Where’d he go? Oh, wait I have him now!” 

The puffin kept circling. Would he go in the burrow? Oh, look, he’s right by the entrance! Oh he’s slowing down! And finally, the glorious climax: “Oh, he’s going in! He’s in the burrow!” 

Olivia had seen him circle before, one day she counted 26 times, but this was the first sighting of him going in. She wondered if he was tending an egg, since some puffin dads do.  If so, and the egg was his progeny, it would be colossal: these two distinct species are not believed to have ever crossed. 

Would this produce a hybrid of the two species? This was regarded as even more unlikely than the horned puffin’s presence. 

Finally people and binoculars calmed down enough to turn toward the many rhinoceros auklets, pigeon guillemots, shearwaters, cormorants, and abundant of bull kelp beds. 

George explained that this all depended on upwelling — the process of surface water being blown towards shore, and deeper, colder water, rich in nutrients that feed phytoplankton and zooplankton, taking its place. This renewal of the tiny creatures at the base of the marine food web nourishes the tiny fish that feed the little-bit-bigger fish that all these birds eat. Puffins are often seen holding many little fish crosswise in their beaks. 

 As the boat motored back to the dock, we were mesmerized by a sunset made spectacular by wildfire smoke — a reminder that onshore, we have work to do to preserve the climate that supports humans and puffins alike. Tufted puffins are and endangered species; we may be too. 

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com.