Darling puffins of May
A PUFFLING sits in the palm of my hand, preparing to jump into the sea. I feel like a parent on the first day of school.
We are on the return leg of a Scottish Seabird Centre trip to the Isle of May (population four), in the outer Firth of Forth and reached by a 30-minute boat ride from North Berwick.
Pufflings — baby puffins — leave their family’s cosy underground burrow when they’re six weeks old and go it alone. Their first journey involves dodging gulls, and avoiding falling over cliffs or getting trapped in ditches.
The island is home to more than a quarter of a million seabirds during the summer months, including 46,000 pairs of puffins.
It’s a National Nature Reserve and one of the UK’s largest puffin colonies.
There are puffins everywhere. The birds are chatting to each other on grassy tussocks, waddling across hillsides, flying in and out of burrows and swooping low overhead with beaks full of sandeels.
Visitors must stay on the network of paths to avoid stepping on an arctic tern’s nest, trampling a puffin’s underground burrow or — as I do — wandering into a greater black backed gull’s territory and being divebombed by a protective mum.
Our guide James’s tour of the island — just over a mile long and 500 yards wide — includes Scotland’s oldest lighthouse, The Beacon: the scene of a tragedy.
On a stormy night in 1791, poisonous fumes from the ash pile produced by the burning coals which provided the lighthouse with its beam seeped into the bedroom where lighthouse keeper George Anderson, his wife and their six children were sleeping. The only survivor was Lucy Anderson, barely a year old. Baby Lucy was taken back to the mainland where, 20 years later, she married one of her rescuers.
As we return to the harbour, James spots a puffling stuck in a ditch and announces that we are to launch a rescue mission of our own, which involves taking him out to sea where he’ll learn to swim, fish and fly.
‘He’s a feisty one,’ says James as the puffling leaps into the water and dives under the waves.
Will he make it? Along with the 11 others on the tour, I hold my breath until the puffling resurfaces and paddles off, without giving his rescuers a second glance.