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What’s in a Name: Puffin Puffinus
Jul 5, 2020 | by Adrian Binns
July 3rd was World Seabird Day, and Chris Brown posted a great blog Every Auk has its Day commemorating this important date. In honor of these fascinating birds, and the plights they face around the world, I’d like to share a bit about puffins, one of my favorite seabirds.
Puffins are always a crowd-pleaser – with colorful grooved bills, bright orange feet, and a diminutive size, they are inevitably described as “adorable.” They move rather comically, clamoring around rocky shorelines; Atlantic Puffins on the east coast, Tufted and Horned Puffins on the west. Puffins are colony nesters, raising their young in dirt burrows situated atop rocky cliffsides. With thick, serrated-edge bills, puffins are well-adapted to scoop up and hold dozens of small fish, which they carry back to their burrows to feed hungry chicks.
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Atlantic Puffin Fratercula arctica
The word puffin is a diminutive of puffinus dating back to 17th century England. Puffinus as in corpulent, plump-bodied or ‘puffy’ – was originally applied to Manx Shearwater and Atlantic Puffins, both of whom breed along the English coast. Maritime explorers used this term when selling their bounty of cured carcasses – nestlings easily plucked from their burrows. Shearwaters retained the latin genus puffinus, while puffins kept the common name in current seabird taxonomy.
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Manx Shearwater Puffinus puffinus
Whatever their name, puffins are adorable, charismatic seabirds! Both puffins and shearwaters can be seen on a number of our trips, and we hope that you can join one of these to enjoy these remarkable seabirds.
Maine: Mountains & Coast – Atlantic Puffin, Great and Sooty Shearwater
Maine: Red-billed Tropicbird – Manx, Great and Sooty Shearwater
Dry Tortugas: Seabirds & Spring Migration – Audubon’s Shearwater
California: Central Coast – Tufted Puffin, Pink-footed Shearwater, Sooty Shearwater, Buller’s Shearwater and Black-vented Shearwater
Washington: Pacific Northwest – Tufted Puffin, Sooty Shearwater and Black-vented Shearwater