What Is a Puffin - Essay Example

Puffins are excellent swimmers and fishers and their coloring greatly aids their aquatic lifestyle such that their white underside camouflages them from predators below by allowing them to blend in with the brightness glaring through the water and their black backs camouflage in perfectly with dark waters, as it appears from above, safeguarding puffins from larger predators and fowl (NHPTV).  Puffins' most defining feature is their fat beaks that are dull and gray in the winter and then brighten to florescent oranges during the mating season.  Puffins have also been called names like “little friar” and “sea parrot” because of their comical markings.  Puffins are pelagic, which means they live in and on the water throughout the year and the only time they come onto the land is to reproduce (NHPTV).  Puffins mate for life and females only lay one egg a year which both parents care for (Barjaktarovic).  The baby puffin, or puffling, is under the supervision of both parents for less than two months and is then ready to take care of him or herself.

There are four species of puffins.  The Atlantic Puffin, the Horned Puffin, the Tufted Puffin, and the Rhinoceros Auklet.  The Atlantic Puffin, otherwise known as the Common Puffin, is the only puffin that can be found on the Atlantic Ocean.  There are somewhere between twelve and fifteen million Atlantic Puffins living on the skirts of the Atlantic Ocean (Project Puffin).  Most of them can be found near Iceland.  Atlantic Puffins are the smallest of the species and can also be identified by a triangular blue marking where their beak meets their face.

The Horned Puffin gets its name because of the large mascara-like black markings or “horns” jutting out from its eyes.  The Horned Puffin is slightly larger than the Atlantic but lacks the blue beak marking.  Horned Puffins live in the Pacific Ocean, commonly nesting along the coast of Alaska. 

The Tufted Puffin gets its name from yellowish streaks of “tufted” feathers that begin behind the eye and flare back like an 80's hairstyle.  The Tufted Puffin is the largest of the four and shares the Pacific with the Horned and Auklet.  

The last puffin is the Rhinoceros Auklet.  The Auklet gets its strange name from the horn-like protuberance that juts out of the top of its beak, which only appears during mating season.  The Auklet also appears to be grayer than its cousins with its face being completely dark and free of markings.  The Auklet also lives along the Pacific Coast, but unlike the others, commonly comes onshore every night to bed.