Meet the parrots of the sea

It might look adorable, but the stumpy and dangerously endangered puffin is a ruthlessly efficient fish killer that’s so hellbent on finding its family a home, it will chase rabbits out of their own burrows, observes Ian Morton

- Ian Morton

IT’S the beak, of course. There’s no other beak like it. The bright colours, the wedgy proportions and the bold profile command the eye. Yet, behind this head-turning display lies a unique working tool. Beaks usually open like the blades of scissors or shears. Not so the puffin’s: it is hinged to allow the top and bottom to operate in parallel and accommodate a neat rack of fishy fare. Its edges have inward serrations for a firm grip on the slippery catch and a rough-ended tongue, plus spines on the upper palate, complete a design that permits the adult bird to return from miles out to sea to feed its land-bound young without spillage. The largest rack recorded in this country is 61 sand eels and a rockling. One of the folk nicknames for the puffin is ‘clown of the sea’, but humour was ever a serious business.

Why the funny name? One easy explanation suggests that the bird’s young are plump and puffed up, but the logical supposition is that it derives from the Middle-English pophyn, the word for the fatty salted carcases of the young of the Manx shearwater, an unrelated species, but one readily available to centuries of coastal foragers to whose diet the little birds provided a welcome seasonal addition. Puffin fledglings were also snatched and stored; local practice did not apparently differentiate between the two species, so the puffin acquired the same identity as the Manx shearwater.