It is all too simple to recognize the puffin, right? Distinct in shape and colorful beak.

Let’s look beyond the colorful beak and try to identify the puffin as a member of the Auk family. Auks are chubby little seabirds with the white and black patterns we have come to love and recognize in our puffins. Each species in the Auk family has its very own distinct black and white pattern.

When the auks are in the water you often cannot see their entire bodies. Often you cannot even see their beak very well with them diving and plunging so far from the shore. Let’s pay attention to the different patterns in the black and white on the Auks and learn to recognize the Puffin within some common Auks.

• The Black Guillemot is mostly black with a little white streak—it has a completely black head and beak.
• The Atlantic Puffin is black around the neck and in a slight cap with a white face and a colorful beak.
• The Razorbill is black on the back except one line of white in the wings and white in the front like the puffin but it has a completely black face except one white streak along its beak—going down its bill from its eye and a white ring around the bill.
• The Ancient Murrelet has a dark grayish black back and a mostly black head but the white comes up higher onto its neck and the tip of its dark beak is light.

Now, maybe we can help others identify the puffins, a few auks and we’ve learned something new.

OK! Now you have an assignment—do a google image search and identify the Auks. =) Write me and tell me what you learned or thought.

References

Podulka, Sandy, Ronald W. Rohrbaugh, Jr., and Rick Bonney, Editors. Handbook of Bird Biology. 2nd edition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 2004.

You can find some beautiful photographs of puffins in the following book.

Alaska: America’s Wildest State By John Schweider

Alaska: America's Wildest State By John Schweider

It is self-published so you will be supporting an excellent photographer. If you are interested in this book click here.

(We do not receive any profit from recommending this book—it just honestly has some good puffin photographs).

Beaks, bills, bird noses—whatever you wish to call them—they are important to every bird.¹ They are full of live tissues, regenerating after billing (a puffin’s form of kissing / affection where they rub bills together), bill-wiping (to clean their bills—typically on rocks or hard surfaces), eating, and defending their young.  The tips of bird beaks grow constantly due to continual wear and tear. Some bird’s beaks even grow longer according to the season. The beak of the Puffin is one example of seasonal change. While it does not change in size, it changes in color. Puffins molt the the colorful outer sheath of their bills after breeding (seasonally).  Their beaks brighten or fade in color when the old skin is worn down and the new layers are revealed depending on which season it happens to be. Maybe they do not need the extra attention they receive with their bright colorful beaks after they have wooed their loves and mated for the season. Perhaps it becomes a liability—making them more susceptible to predators.

Nares (nostrils) are often on the upper part of the beak. These can vary depending on the bird and its needs. For example, some birds have a protective flap, the operculum, covering part of the nostrils. This is helpful in keeping debris out.² To each bird their own beak.

Most birds have black beaks and bills. There are some birds who have colorful beaks such as the Common Merganser, the Ruddy Duck or the choughs from the Corvid Family of birds. Besides the Toucan, no other birds compare to the magnificently colorful beaked Puffins.

Beak of the Puffin

References

Podulka, Sandy, Ronald W. Rohrbaugh, Jr., and Rick Bonney, Editors. Handbook of Bird Biology. 2nd edition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 2004.

1. FYI: The visible portion of the bill is called the rhamphotheca. The bill actually does extend inside the face. [↩]
2. Podulka, Sandy, Ronald W. Rohrbaugh, Jr., and Rick Bonney, Editors. Handbook of Bird Biology. 2nd edition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 2004. [↩]

You can see Puffins at Skomer Island in Wales. There you will spot guillemots, razorbills and puffins and if you visit in May could catch a glimpse of hatching puffin chicks on a carpet of indigo bluebells. Walk to the rocks at Garland Stone and hang out with the Atlantic grey seals or take a closer look at the nesting seabirds at The Wick.

read more | digg story

In line with yesterday’s post I thought I would focus on another extinct member of the Alcidae family—a close relative to the present day puffins—the Great Auk, Pinguinus impennis, the garefowl or penguin (long before the penguins of today!). This flightless bird became extinct in the mid 19th century. It hung in there a long time being the only species in its genus, Pinguinus, to survive until modern times.

The Great Auk was found in great numbers on islands off eastern Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway,

Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis)

Ireland and Great Britain before being hunted to extinction. Remains found in Floridian middens suggest that, at least occasionally, the Great Auk ventured that far south in winter as recently as the 14th century.

The Great Auk was one of the many species originally described by Linnaeus in his 18th century work, Systema Naturae.

Analysis of mtDNA sequences have confirmed morphological and biogeographical studies in regarding the Razorbill as the Great Auk’s closest living relative. They were also closely related to the Little Auk (Dovekie), which underwent a radically different evolution compared to Pinguinus. Due to its outward similarity to the razorbill (apart from flightlessness and size), the Great Auk was often placed in the genus Alca.

However, the fossil record (Pinguinus alfrednewtoni from the Early Pliocene Yorktown Formation of the Lee Creek Mine, USA) and molecular evidence demonstrate that the three genera, while still closely related, diverged soon after their common ancestor (probably similar to a stout Xantus’s Murrelet) had spread to the coasts of the Atlantic. By that time however, the murres, or Atlantic Guillemots had apparently already split off from the other Atlantic alcids. Razorbill-like birds were common in the Atlantic during the Pliocene, but the evolution of the Dovekie is sparsely documented.

The molecular data are compatible with either view, but the weight of evidence suggests placing the Great Auk in a distinct genus.

Standing about 75-85 cm (30-34 in) tall and weighing around 5 kg (11 lb), the flightless Great Auk was the largest of the auks. It had white lower- and glossy black upper feathers, with an area of white feathers on both sides of the head between the beak and each eye. The longest wing feathers were only 10 cm (3.9 in) long. The eyes had a reddish-brown iris, and the beak was black with white transverse grooves. Its feet and claws were black while the webbed skin between the toes was brown/black. Juvenile birds had less prominent grooves in their beaks and had mottled white and black necks.

Great Auks were excellent swimmers, using their wings to swim underwater. Their main food was fish, usually 12-20 cm in length, but occasionally up to half the bird’s own length. Based on remains associated with Great Auk bones found on Funk Island and on ecological and morphological considerations, it seems that Atlantic menhaden and capelin were favored prey items.

Great Auks walked slowly and sometimes used their wings to help them traverse rough terrain. They had few natural predators, mainly large marine mammals and birds of prey,[citation needed] and had no innate fear of humans. Their flightlessness and awkwardness on land compounded their vulnerability to humans, who hunted them for food, feathers, and as specimens for museums and private collections.

The Great Auk laid only one egg each year, which it incubated on bare ground until hatching in June. The eggs averaged 12.4cm (4.9in) in length, and were yellowish white to light ochre with a varying pattern of black, brown or greyish spots and lines which often congregated on the large end.

The Great Auk was hunted on a significant scale for food, eggs and down from at least the 8th century. Prior to that, hunting by local natives can be documented from Late Stone Age Scandinavia and Eastern North America, and from early 5th century Labrador where the bird only seems to have occurred as a straggler. A person buried at the Maritime Archaic site at Port au Choix, Newfoundland, dating to about 2000 BC, seems to have been interred clothed in a suit made from more than 200 Great Auk skins, with the heads left attached as decoration.

The Little Ice Age may have reduced their numbers, but massive exploitation for their down drastically reduced the population. Specimens of the Great Auk and its eggs became collectible and highly prized, and collecting of the eggs contributed to the demise of the species.

Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis)

It was on Stac an Armin, St Kilda, Scotland, in July, 1840, that the last great auk seen in the British Isles was caught and then killed. A then 75-yr. old inhabitant of St Kilda told Henry Evans, a frequent visitor to the archipelago, that he and his father-in-law with another man had caught a “garefowl,” noticing its little wings and the large white spot on its head. They tied it up and kept it alive for three days, and then killed it by beating it with a stick, apparently because they believed it to be a witch.

The last population lived on Geirfuglasker (“Great Auk Rock”) off Iceland. This island was a volcanic rock surrounded by cliffs which made it inaccessible to humans, but in 1830 the rock submerged, and the birds moved to the nearby island Eldey which was accessible from a single side. The last pair, found incubating an egg, were killed there on 3 July 1844, with Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson strangling the adults and Ketill Ketilsson smashing the egg with his boot. However, a later claim of a live individual sighted in 1852 on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland has been accepted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN).

Today, around 75 eggs of the Great Auk remain in museum collections, along with 24 complete skeletons and 81 mounted skins. While thousands of isolated bones have been collected from 19th century Funk Island to Neolithic middens, only a minute number of complete skeletons exist.

The Great Auk is the mascot of Archmere Academy in Claymont, Delaware, USA; Sir Sandford Fleming college in Ontario, Canada; and the Adelaide University Choral Society (AUCS), Australia. It is also the mascot of the Knowledge Masters educational competition.

The Auk, the scientific journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union, is named after this bird.

According to Homer Hickam’s memoir Rocket Boys and its subsequent film production October Sky, the early rockets he and his friends built were named “Auk” along with a sequential numeration as an obvious display of irony.

The Great Auk is the subject of a novel, The Last Great Auk by Allen Eckert, which tells of the events leading to the extinction of the Great Auk as seen from the perspective of the last one alive.

A Great Auk (presumably stuffed) appears among the possessions of Baba the Turk in the opera The Rake’s Progress by Igor Stravinsky.

In the novel adaptation of The Wicker Man by Robin Hardy & Anthony Shaffer, the (fictitious) Summerisle is revealed to be home to a surviving colony of Great Auks.

The Two Ronnies enacted a parody on BBC TV entitled “Raiders of the Lost Auk”, in which an archaeologist tracks down a golden auk, pursued by Nazis.

The Great Auk is a significant factor in the children’s book The Island of Adventure by Enid Blyton. Jack is a keen ornithologist, and believes that the mysterious Island of Gloom may host a surviving Great Auk. This belief leads the children to the island, where they don’t find a Great Auk but do find adventure.

The Great Auk is also the subject of a Ballet called Still Life at the Penguin Café.

The Great Auk is a featured character and subject of the song “Dream too Far” in the ecological musical story, Rockford’s Rock Opera.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Auk

The Puffin family of birds is small. It always has been. But there were more along time ago. Fossils including eggshells, bones of immature birds, and articulated skeletons suggest that nesting colonies of an older puffin once occurred on San Miguel and San Nicolas islands off the coasts of California.

One such puffin, the now extinct Dow’s Puffin (Fratercula dowi), once live in the Channel Islands of California. In October 1986 George L. Kennedy and D.R. Muhs discovered over 5,000 bones and eggs identified to be a new species of puffins, the Dow’s Puffin, on the Island of San Miguel. Once discovered this new species was named after Ronald J. Dow who provided assistance and logistical support to the scientists during their trips to San Nicolas Island.

The smallest bone specimens of the Dow’s Puffin found was dated at aproximately 11,890 +/- 95 years BP (before present — present being set at 1950) having lived during the Early Holocene period. Radiocarbon dating places most of the bones somewhere between less than 38,000 BP and 25,160 +/- 380 years BP. This means they were alive for approximately between 13,270 and 26,110 years.  This is not very long in comparison to other species, even birds. However, other previously unidentified bones found on Santa Rosa Island in the mid to late 1960′s are now thought to belong to the Dow’s Puffin. The interesting part is these bones date back as early as 100,000 years BP and are “at the large end of its size range.”

This would indicate the bird evolved from bigger to smaller until its eventual evolutionary demise. This would also mean the Dow’s Puffin lived a long, long evolutionary life.

The Dow’s Puffin was relative in size to the Rhinoceros Auklet and the

Measurements of bills and mandibles of Fratercula dowi compared to other Puffins

Horned Puffin but its skull was more like the Rhinoceros Auklet and the Tufted Puffin. It is the latter two which are now considered its closest relatives. It is not the size or shape of the bird fossils that distinguish the Dow’s Puffin from other Puffins but rather the “degree of dorsoventral expansion of the bill and mandible.” (See figure 4 — B and C are from the Dow’s Puffin, A is the Rhino Auklet, D is the Tufted Puffin and E is Horned Puffin. The size difference is notable as you can see.

One very well preserved egg thought to be of the egg of a Dow’s Puffin is approximately 2.6 inches (66mm) long and 1.7 inches (43.2mm) around the largest part. It is approximately the size of eggs of the Rhino Auklet and the Horned Puffin but smaller than that of the Tufted Puffin.

While one would not expect puffins to live or breed in Southern California today because it is too warm for them—60,000 to 30,000 years ago the climate was more like the climate found today off the Washington State and Oregon coasts. This is exactly the kind of climate puffins prefer.

All information from this article was extrapolated or taken directly from the following scientific journal publication: A NEW SPECIES OF EXTINCT LATE PLEISTOCENE PUFFIN (AVES: ALCIDAE) FROM THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA CHANNEL ISLANDS by Daniel A. Guthrie, Howell W. Thomas and George L. Kennedy.

Researchers were shocked when they counted breeding tufted puffins along the Oregon coast last summer. The numbers showed the charismatic seabird with the comical mask had become alarmingly scarce. From 6,560 tufted puffins in 1979 to a rough count of 142 found on Oregon’s cliffsides and rock islands last year.

read more | digg story

While the Tufted Puffin is not considered endangered by the officials, I would say going from 6,560 to 142 is in fact endangered. We are decimating our bird populations all over the world. When will we start to take the necessary steps to protect the other species on this planet? It makes me sad to think we might lose the Tufted Puffin, or any bird really.
Here are some of the small things recommended for us to do on a personal level:

What You Can Do to Help Birds¹

1. http://www.stateofthebirds.org/home-page-documents/what-you-can-do-to-help-birds [↩]

Another puffin game… Puffin Putt — you play 18 holes of online golf through manicured grass and sand–all as a cute little puffin. Its pretty fun. Here are some screenshots:

Screenshot -- Puffin Putt Online Game

Ok, not bad…

Puffin Putt Online Game

Click HERE to play the Puffin Putt Game online.