Left breathless by tireless puffin
PTHERE’S some magic happening right now in the cold watery wastes of the North Atlantic – the puffins are coming home. Puffins are the funniest of birds; they’re the jokers of the high seas, the clowns, and I love them.
A couple of years back I sailed my own boat to Iceland to enjoy their company.The title of my book, Farewell Mister Puffin, suggests it might not have gone as well as I wished, but that’s another story. For now, let’s celebrate the return of these plucky little birds with their beaks as vivid as the stripes on a deckchair, and a waddle far funnier than Charlie Chaplin’s.What bird is always out of breath? A puffin! Ha ha, what a laugh they are.
But the real point about puffins is that they know what they like, and they go for it, and that’s admirable. That’s why they are away at sea for the entire stormy winter, never setting foot on land because they don’t like it much.The waves might roll over them, but they’ll bob up for more. I admire self-sufficiency like that.
And what I admire even more is their faithfulness. It is remarkable that after endless dark months in frozen waters, they will find their way back to exactly the same nest that they occupied the year before, and to the same mate with whom they’ve raised chicks for years.
I can almost cry at the thought of these creatures, whose devotion to each other demands such physical effort.
And what a remarkable feat of navigation compared to us hopeless humans who sometimes can’t find our short way home after a few
pints. Puffins don’t do fights either. If other birds attack them they’ll turn that multi-coloured cheek, which is not to be confused with cowardice. Rather it is their way of surviving.
In other words, keep your head down when trouble’s around. Good lesson for all of us there.
They’re not perfect, of course.A certain portliness can come over them and it is not unknown for them to swallow 80 per cent of all
the food they catch to feed their mate and her young. It’s a bit like eating your kid’s chips on the way back from the chip shop.
I see a lot of the puffin in me. Puffins like remoteness, such as that found on cliffs and islands. They don’t much like to come out of their burrows.Time on land is time wasted; they want to get back to sea. And that’s pretty much where I’m heading now.