All animals → Atlantic Puffin

Atlantic Puffin

Fratercula arctica · medium

The puffin's bill is seasonal. For most of the year it is a plain, narrower grey; in spring it grows brightly coloured outer plates that are shed again after breeding. The colours fluoresce under ultraviolet light, which puffins can see and we cannot, so the display is more elaborate than it appears to us.

That bill also holds an unusual number of fish at once, arranged crosswise. Backward-pointing spines on the tongue and palate pin each catch in place while the bird opens its mouth for the next, which is how a puffin returns to its burrow with a dozen sandeels in a neat row.

They nest in burrows dug into clifftop turf or among boulders, laying a single egg, and they are surprisingly long-lived, returning to the same site and often the same partner for many years.

The rest of the year they are genuinely pelagic — dispersing far out across the North Atlantic, sleeping on the water and coming to land not at all.

Breeding success has fallen in parts of the range as sandeel stocks have shifted with sea temperature. Colonies can look busy while quietly failing, because adults return whether or not there is enough food to raise a chick.

Where it lives

Worml lists the atlantic puffin as native to 8 countries — Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Russia, United Kingdom and United States. Its habitat is north atlantic open ocean and coastal cliff colonies.

Ranges here are reduced to whole countries for playability and exclude introduced populations — see about the data for what that simplification leaves out.

In the game

Atlantic Puffin is rated medium. To solve the round you need to find any 4 of its 8 listed countries. How scoring works →

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