What an adorable flag! It comes in two sizes: Standard (40 inches by 40 inches and 1.9 ounces) and Garden (18 inches by 18 inches and 0.3 ounces).

Audubon Flag, Atlantic Puffin

Atlantic Puffin swiming

Originally uploaded by victorcerutti

And yet another great photograph from victorcerutti on flickr.

This puffin is scooping down. Colorful beak. The clown of the sea swimming about finding food. Great action image capture.

Atlantic Puffin landing

Originally uploaded by victorcerutti

Another fantastic photo by victorcerutti on flickr. Poetry in motion. This is a puffin landing…they are pretty fast and this photographer captured the motion very well.

Wet Atlantic Puffin

Originally uploaded by victorcerutti

What a great photo. It shows the bill after mating season when it is not as colorful and it shows the puffin when it is wet. A very natural and wonderful photograph.

NATIONAL WILDLIFE MAGAZINE Aug/Sep 1994, vol. 32 no. 5 The Puffins Keep Their Secrets By Les Line These small seabirds delight human visitors to rocky islands in north seas, yet remain biological mysteries.

The lore of the Atlantic puffin, a species that ranks among everyone’s favorite seabirds, includes an enduring story about how parent birds starve their single nearly grown chicks until hunger motivates the youngsters to leave the security of clifftop burrows and, in the dark of night, leap to the pounding sea.

A famous Welsh birdman, Ronald Lockley, discovered this behavior in the 1930s while studying puffins on the island of Skokholm off Wales. When matchsticks that he lodged…

Read the rest of this article (IT IS WORTH THE READ REALLY!!!) and more National Wildlife Magazine features online.

The Witless Bay Ecological Reserve contains four islands—Gull, Green, Great, and Pee Pee—that teem with bird life during the seabird breeding season.

The reserve contains North America’s largest Atlantic puffin colony. More than 260,000 pairs of the province’s official bird nest here during the late spring and summer.

In addition, black-legged kittiwakes and common murres appear in the thousands.

The islands lie just a few kilometres off the east coast of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, between the communities of Bay Bulls and Bauline East, half an hour south of St. John’s. The reserve area takes in 31 km²-29 km² of this is a marine area around the islands. Regulations govern the operation of boats inside the reserve during the sensitive nesting season (April 1-September 1).

Seabirds generally spend most of the year at sea and only return to land from May to August to breed and raise their young. For the most part, public observation of their activities must be done from boats-landing on the islands themselves requires a scientific research or special access permit.

The Witless Bay Islands are part of the Maritime Barrens-Southeastern Barrens subregion (pdf). The Islands were originally designated a wildlife reserve in 1964. They became the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve in 1983, three years after the Wilderness and Ecological Reserves Act was passed.

(The above information was copy and pasted directly from the official website for Witless Bay Ecological Reserve.)

If you want to see the ‘largest Atlantic puffin colony in North America’ you can book a tour with O’Briens.

This was just a sweet photograph. I love the color of the water and the position of the puffin. Puffins are excellent swimmers! Puffins can stay underwater up to a minute but generally they only stay under for 20 to 30 seconds. They sort of fly underwater which makes them swim pretty fast and makes up for their clumsy flying skills in the air. The puffin often crash lands when it is flying through the air but can reach speeds up to 55 mph. Luckily,  their wings suit them well for the water and help them swim to catch up to 10 fish with every dip and allowing them to plunge up to 200 feet deep in one dive!

An Atlantic puffin on Maine's on Eastern Egg Rock appears to imitate a decoy on July 9 by standing on one leg. Decoys were used to lure the gregarious birds ashore after they were re-introduced to the island following a 100-year absence. Photo by Robert F. Bukaty / AP

Hunted to extinction in state, they’re thriving thanks to human help Puffins, which resemble half-pint penguins except that they can fly, were heavily hunted along the Maine coast for their meat and feathers, and by 1901 only one pair remained, researchers said. Puffins are often confused with penguins. They have similar colors, and both swim under water using their wings as fins, but they are not related and live at opposite polar ends of the world.

In 1973, with backing from the National Audubon Society and help from the Canadian Wildlife Service, Kress began transplanting 2-week-old puffin chicks from Great Island off Newfoundland, 1,000 miles to the northeast.

These days there are 90 nesting pairs on Eastern Egg, among more than 700 nesting pairs on four Maine islands, Kress said.

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I never would have guessed that the three puffins were so different in size. It helped to see the difference in size—so I decided to make the graphic below so you could see for yourself.

Atlantic Puffins are about 10 to 11 1/2 inches (25-29 cm)

Horned Puffins are bigger by 5 inches — 15 inches tall (38 cm)

And the Tufted Puffins are the biggest puffins at 16 inches tall (44 cm)

I received the game yesterday and played it for a few hours straight. It was pretty fun, cute and informative. I learned a lot about puffins as well as about other animals near to the puffin. The graphics are not state-of-the-art but there is some good hand drawn art work throughout and some good photographs.